ABSTRACT
The subject of Korean labour in wartime Japan has garnered increased attention since the early 1990s when movements for redress from the Japanese government began to gain momentum. Colonized by the Japanese state from 1910 until 1945, Korea was subject to the most thoroughgoing application of colonial administration and cultural assimilation policies among the various territories that made up the Japanese empire. The demands for redress have come from different segments of Japan’s former colonial population who were subject to coerced forms of labour by and for the imperial state. Korean groups have been the most vocal in calling for reparations and formal apologies from the Japanese government, which has steadfastly refused all demands for monetary compensation and official apology. The Korean military sexual slaves (“comfort women,” who are discussed in Chunghee Sarah Soh’s essay in this volume) drafted to serve the Japanese Imperial Army on the continent and throughout Japan’s occupied territories in Asia have gained the most international attention for their efforts to publicize the continuing plight of women whose lives have been shattered by their wartime experience. Lawsuits against the Japanese government have also been filed on behalf of a smaller number of Korean women drafted during the last years of the war to work in Japanese textile factories.1 Korean men forced to work in Japanese coal mines made up another significant population of labour coerced by the imperial state, and lawsuits demanding apology and reparation for workers in mines run by Mitsui and other companies have similarly gained international attention.2 In addition to the drafting of Koreans for sexual and industrial labour, the Japanese state also conscripted Koreans into the Japanese Imperial Army by the last years of the war. Although these various forms of state-led forced conscription began in earnest in 1939, the roots of such systems stretch further back into a much longer history of Korean out-migration to the metropole and other areas of the expanding Japanese imperium beginning at the time of the peninsula’s formal annexation in 1910.3
Instances of women’s forced sexual labour and the forced recruitment of men for industrial labour have received the most attention from scholars and the general public in recent years, but the less-remarked-upon recruitment of Korean women and girls for factory work offers another aspect of Japan’s military and industrial mobilization for total war. This essay draws on an increasingly large body of literature on Japanese colonialism and on wartime labour mobilization of Koreans to
examine policies of women’s education and assimilation in Korea, the reliance on a middle-class ideal of womanhood that required such education, and the application of this gendered and class-based ideology to policies of wartime labour mobilization. I argue that gender and class determined to a large degree the political relationship of colonial subjects to the imperial state. Moreover, these relationships were central to the state’s methods of recruiting labour for total war mobilization by the time hostilities broke out with China in 1937. Class and educational background had much to do with whether a young Korean woman would be recruited into factory work, or as a military sexual slave.
