Korea was the third East Asian nation to take a step toward inter- nationalisation; the Opium Wars of 1839–42 had opened China’s doors, and Japan had met Commodore Perry’s ‘black ships’ upon its shores in 1853. The United States did not make contact with Korea until 1882, and even then, a Chinese official managed the process of communication between these countries. Korea avoided interference from international forces in the early stages of its modern history but over time has not been immune from the national effects of elites’ struggles for world hegemony.
This intriguing peninsula protrudes off the edge of eastern China and borders slightly at its northeastern tip with Russia, and has been historically manipulated by some of the world’s most powerful players.
The modern history of Korea starts with Japanese occupation which began in 1905 and then became formally annexed in 1910, and did not end until August 15, 1945. Japan had invaded several times before 1910 and has acted as a sometimes very brutal ‘big brother’ toward its neighbour. My analysis of Korea begins with a look into Japanese colonisation.
Top-down Production Restructuring During Japanese Colonial Industrialisation This section discusses Japanese colonisation, or the early stages of industrialisation that occurred under elite-led conditions and often resulted in power struggles between those at the helm of restructuring and those affected, in particular, workers. Japan was a late-comer to compete in the world order of mixed imperialisms (1875–1945), although it had begun its preparations for world domination from 1871 to 1873 by sending out an ‘Iwakura Mission’ of Meiji oligarchs to study Western banking, technology, political systems, and infrastructures. Sending researchers to the United Kingdom and the United States, the mission was specifically executed to gain information on how other powerful nations
had gained leverage and power over other nations in a world whose traditional boundaries and identities increasingly appeared to fragment, and the ‘international’ was an emerging arena to be measured. Korea and Taiwan would be two of Japan’s first experiments in imperial pursuits.
During the entire Tokugawa period, until 1868, Japan had been a relatively quiet neighbour, but ‘had always had her eye on Korea’ (Conroy 1960: 4). So when Japan invaded and colonised Korea in 1910, and proceeded to use her labour and resources to aid its own growth and to further its own imperialist initiatives, it may not have come as a surprise.
As a component to imperial expansion however, Japan managed Korea’s first industrial revolution under a developmental colonial regime. Japan forced Korean citizens into lives of propaganda-driven slavery, filched Korean land and distributed it to tenant sharecroppers, and built railways and ports so Japanese industrial workers could essentially ‘eat Korea’s rice in Japan’. In fact, from 1920–35, Japan increased food production in Korea specifically for export to Japan, following a classic colonial pattern.
Japan also directed the building of roads and power supply systems, providing an infrastructure for their advancements. Choi (1989: 47) argues that the first period of industrialisation effectively destroyed Korea’s traditional mode of manufacturing production, which had been based on a rural handicraft industry of weaving or producing hemp cloth. This was the beginning of the very forced opening of the Hermit Kingdom.
Interestingly, the international community turned a blind eye toward Japanese occupation.
Japanese occupation marks the beginning of Korean modernisation and rationalisation. The colonising bureaucracy rationalised land relationships by fixing property rights and instigated industrial development. Cumings (1997: 149) comments that analysis of this process is often restricted to Japanese perspectives, whose narrative of this period of Korean history detracts from Korean citizens’ experiences of colonial atrocities that have led to a lingering and widespread resentment toward Japan. Clifford states that some Koreans now would argue in favour of colonialism because it ‘had the virtue of laying the foundation for subsequent economic development’ (1997: 27). Vogel (1991: 90–1) sees Japan as a model for Korea’s development. Japan held ‘the primary source of capital and technology for South Korea’s export-led market. Viewed from this perspective, Japan played the most critical role in promoting economic growth in South Korea’ (Moon and Nishino 2002: 4). There is a certainly a proportion of the Korean population who would argue in this
manner, but they are most likely to be those who have become members of the capitalist class and now, transnational capitalist class network as a result of Korea’s development. This position tends to overlook the human trauma and political exclusion that has been a major factor of industrialis- ation.
For the supplementation of its imperial strategy at the onset of WWII, Japan invested in Korea’s mining, chemical, railroad, and hydroelectric plant industries. The number of factory workers in Korea rapidly increased from 49,000 in 1921, to 80,000 in 1925, and jumped to 102,000 in 1930. In the pattern toward a dual economy, in all sectors, Japan gained benefits from Korea’s modernisation. In 1937, Korea became the supply and production base aiding Japan’s expansion into Manchuria. So although Korea could not defend itself in the global hegemonic struggles resulting in imperial intervention and war, its labour and resources played a complicit part in this ongoing struggle, via Japanese dominance.
In 1910, Korean people could not have imagined the changes to their very livelihood and social experience that were soon to emerge. Thirty years later, 420,000 mining, manufacturing, transportation and com- munication workers became the fire behind Korea’s first exposure to industrialisation, solidarity and class consciousness emerged (Ogle 1990:
3). Japan was extremely oppressive toward Korean factory workers during occupation, forcing them and all citizens likewise to learn the Japanese language and adopt Japanese names. Under Japanese colonisation, Korean workers endured ‘wage discrimination, long work hours and hazardous working conditions’ (Kwon and O’Donnell 2001: 17). Most of the managers in the newly implemented factories were Japanese, but some Koreans were trained to manage in a similar way to the Japanese.
Simmering anti-Japanese sentiment and resistance to the substandard working conditions led to the original formation of Korean class consciousness and the formation of labour unions.
Workers dealing with such oppression in the workplace joined a more general movement for independence from Japan, which roused a nascent labour movement. The March 1, 1919 Independence Movement was an event staged to protest Japanese occupation. 33 signatures of nationalist leaders were compiled in a public declaration against Japanese dominance.
Chung (1995: 80) attributes anti-Japanese sentiment for bringing people together into a singular objective of resistance regardless of class position.
These early defensive social movements indicate a mass recognition that it would take collective resistance to defend workers and other oppressed
people against both external and internal oppression. In 1920, at the height of colonisation, 81 labour disputes broke out, involving 4,599 workers, and in 1930 there were 160 cases that involved 18,972 workers.
Finally, the Japanese government drove the Korean labour movement underground in the last stage of its period of rule and in the 1930s and the voice of workers was effectively quashed.
Japanese Colonisation and Trasformismo
Mitchell’s work on Europe’s colonisation of Egypt discusses the disciplining of populations to instigate modernisation. Colonised citizens gain a ‘new conception of space, new forms of personhood, and a new means of manufacturing the experience of the real’ (1988: ix, xi) in relation to modernisation. This is reminiscent of my discussion of trasformismo, because the appeal to people’s subjectivity allows a powerful role for ideas in the ‘experience of the real’ (ibid.). But Mitchell also argues that modernisation entails the direct disciplining of people and institutions, generated through educational processes in a colonial environment.
Cumings (1997: 147) writes that Japan ‘put its citizens through a regimen of public education that seemed perfectly designed to develop the industrious political subject, with the vices of self-surveillance and repression’, and this tendency was translated into colonial practice. In the processes of hegemonic consolidation, states take an educative role in hegemonic consolidation (PN: 242). Unlike Mitchell’s Foucault-inspired understanding of discipline however, a neo-Gramscian analysis cannot ignore the exploitative elements inherent to the discipline of workers and citizens under colonial rule or under any form of state for that matter.
During Japanese forced industrialisation in Korea, colonial leaders demanded ‘efficiency’ of workers rather than the historically developed kinship relations of production that had cultivated a subsistence economy, introduced the concept of training and work standardisation along targeted output requirements, and suppressed and controlled all aspects of Korean industrial education. Itoho Hirobumi, the first Residence-General, closed all pre-existing Korean technical, agricultural, commercial and
‘correspondence officer training’ schools, replacing them with one official training centre in Seoul in 1906 and several others in rural areas for the training of manual technicians ‘required for Japanese exploitation of various Korean products’ (60). Japanese-run schools did not offer qualified industrial education but only basic household-level industrial and manual education. In 1927, the first vocational place of education,
Hypsung Vocational School, offering commerce-focussed education was opened in response to Japanese increased demands on the industrial workforce. Hierarchical production relations during the colonial period were such that the Japanese forced workers to undergo training into particular skills, a relationship that is echoed in less explicit terms in later economic policy.
But between 1910 and 1919, there were four types of colonial practical schools: agricultural, commercial, industrial, and ‘simple’ vocational schools (KRIVET 1999: 108). Each practical school was designed to formulate the types of workers needed to organise an industrial economy suited for production of goods to be extracted by colonial leaders.
During the period of ‘cultural rule’ (1920–31), Japan rewrote the entire Korean education system, and during ‘military rule’ beginning in 1931, the colonial government as discussed above, demanded accelerated agri- cultural production. This would require ideological training intended to transform consciousness toward Japanese ways of thinking and working and thus a malleable workforce. The Japanese introduced new methods of training, which pushed beyond apprenticeships and kinship systems of craft acquisition skills but preceded formalised VET. While this form of education does not appear at first glance to hold trasformismo like qualities, it makes an appeal to an aspect of workers’ subjectivities that transcends physical manpower. The Japanese were perhaps a mutation of British nineteenth century bourgeoisie who graciously forced training upon workers who were expected to passively and gratefully accept the good will of this activity.
As the war intensified, Japan soon realised its empire depended on output of production, and instituted an employer/employee relationship of what it called ‘industrial patriotism’ to encourage higher rates of production called sampo. From each subsection of each firm, one representative was chosen and given the responsibility to form a workers’
organisation, or association. These associations were designed to provide workers with limited education on work efficiency, but each group was imbued with the intent to prevent worker disputes and unrest, as well as to increase productivity. Sampo is a form trasformismo in that it gave workers a form of authority in the workplace to manage associations, but in practice, prevented workers from formulating a voice, and re-instated their subordinate position as producers for the elite class. The message for workers was that their most important role was for increased output, and that their position required education toward this end, thus glossing over
the completely hierarchical relations inherent to colonisation, and the slavery-like conditions that workers suffered.
So Japan placed ongoing pressure upon Korean workers to conform to their cultural, ideological, and practical standards for skills attainment in the workplace. This imperial nation named its development project or accumulation strategy in Korea one of ‘modernisation’, while Cumings calls it an early version of ‘bureaucratic-authoritarian path to industrialis- ation’ (Cumings 1997: 149–50). Thus Japan laid the foundations for Korean development. Whilst the colonial leaders did not gain much citizen support for leadership, trasformismo is noted in the way that the ‘best’
work positions and concessions such as found within the sampo were granted to workers who did not resist their directives.
Japan forced worker consolidation into its production strategies by requiring Korean workers to adopt ‘Fordist’ relations of production during the period of colonisation. During the period of rival imperialisms, American modes of production became influential internationally. In 1913 Ford opened the first moving assembly line, requiring a de-skilled production force. Mass production required cheap, mass labour, and this was in abundance in Korea. The US Fordist reorganisation of production inspired Japanese activity in Korea at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Gramsci discusses Fordism as ‘an ultra-modern form of production and of working methods, such as is offered by the most advanced American variety, the industry of Henry Ford’ (PN: 280–1). Fordism required both force and persuasion: ‘a political regime in which trade unions would be subdued, workers might be offered a higher real standard of living, and the ideological legitimation of this new kind of capitalism would be embodied in cultural practices and social relations extending far beyond the workplace’ (Rupert, forthcoming). In the postwar era, Rupert claims, the institutionalisation of Fordism allowed the USA to possess half the world’s production (Rupert 1995). So it is no wonder Japan, one of the
‘rival imperialisms’, implemented this model within Korea during this period of passive revolution.
In 1943, as the war started to ‘turn against Japan’, the colonial power announced an ‘Emergency Agenda for Education’ and opened 25 more industrial schools by 1945, simultaneous to sending students to military factories rather than providing complete training. Koreans realised soon enough that the colonialist nation was more interested in exploiting their labour force than providing training that could allow their home country to compete against their captors, and resentment began to build (KRIVET
1999: 61–2). World War II did not end in Japan’s favour, and soon enough, Korea was hurled into the next phase of national, social and economic restructuring.