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Borderline Japan by
This book offers a radical reinterpretation of postwar Japan's policies towards immigrants and foreign residents. Drawing on a wealth of historical material, Tessa Morris-Suzuki shows how the Cold War played a decisive role in shaping Japan's migration controls. She explores the little-known world of the thousands of Korean 'boat people' who entered Japan in the immediate postwar period, focuses attention on the US military service people and their families and employees, and also takes readers behind the walls of Japan's notorious Omura migrant detention centre, and into the lives of Koreans who opted to leave Japan in search of a better future in communist North Korea. This book offers a fascinating contrast to traditional images of postwar Japan and sheds light on the origins and the dilemmas of migration policy in twenty-first century Japan.
Call Number: JV8723 .M67 2010ISBN: 9780521864602
Proletarian Gamble by
Koreans constituted the largest colonial labor force in imperial Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Caught between the Scylla of agricultural destitution in Korea and the Charybdis of industrial depression in Japan, migrant Korean peasants arrived on Japanese soil amid extreme instability in the labor and housing markets. In The Proletarian Gamble, Ken C. Kawashima maintains that contingent labor is a defining characteristic of capitalist commodity economies. He scrutinizes how the labor power of Korean workers in Japan was commodified, and how these workers both fought against the racist and contingent conditions of exchange and combated institutionalized racism. Kawashima draws on previously unseen archival materials from interwar Japan as he describes how Korean migrants struggled against various recruitment practices, unfair and discriminatory wages, sudden firings, racist housing practices, and excessive bureaucratic red tape. Demonstrating that there was no single Korean "minority," he reveals how Koreans exploited fellow Koreans and how the stratification of their communities worked to the advantage of state and capital. However, Kawashima also describes how, when migrant workers did organize--as when they became involved in Rōsō (the largest Korean communist labor union in Japan) and in Zenkyō (the Japanese communist labor union)--their diverse struggles were united toward a common goal. In The Proletarian Gamble, his analysis of the Korean migrant workers' experiences opens into a much broader rethinking of the fundamental nature of capitalist commodity economies and the analytical categories of the proletariat, surplus populations, commodification, and state power.
ISBN: 9780822392293Publication Date: 2009
- Development of Korean communities in Japan: Migrant interactions with urban environments This dissertation utilizes Complex Adaptive Systems theory to investigate the roles of the urban environments of Tokyo and Osaka in the development of Korean communities in Japan. Spatial analysis of distinct Korean communities allows for the examination of urban factors of each city which contributed to the patterns of Korean immigration and community formation. By utilizing a comparative narrative of the two cities, distinctions between the organic growth of Osaka and the planned city of Tokyo are illuminated. Additionally, the dissertation utilizes the concept of function-based spatiality to show how each city interacted with its surrounding regional, national, and global spheres. The functions of Tokyo, as a gateway to Western modernization and center of the Japanese state, shaped the interactions with Korean immigrants. Likewise, Osaka's functions as a center of mercantilism and second city played a large role in how Koreans were incorporated into the urban ethnoscape. While there is a long history of interaction and migration between the Japanese archipelago and Korean peninsula, this dissertation focuses on the period from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Initial Koreans in Japan, or Zainichi as they came to be known as, were political reformers or students. They were male and lived primarily in Tokyo ...
Function-Based Spatiality and the Development of Korean Communities in Japan by ISBN: 0739173685Publication Date: 2014
