Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945: 337 (Harvard East Asian Monographs) - Tapa dura

This well-researched and elegantly written social history of Japanese settlers in colonial Korea fills a critical void. Much has been written on the political history of Japan's expansion into and annexation of Korea and the Korean experience under Japanese colonial rule, but Japanese settlers hardly feature in the history of Japanese colonialism in Korea. Drawing on Korean and Japanese primary sources, Uchida crafts a bottom-up narrative of Japanese colonialism in Korea, portraying Japanese settlers as both vanguards of and obstacles to Japanese colonial rule. Settlers' interests did not always align with the colonial state's interests. According to Uchida, the volatile relationship between settlers and the colonial state partly stems from the group's social composition. More like French settlers in Algiers than British settlers in Kenya, Japanese settlers in Korea were mostly from lower social classes, and were mostly concerned with improving their own conditions. In spite of their humble social origins, there were several success stories about those who built business empires or established themselves in journalism or politics. The inclusion of these settlers' biographies highlights individual experiences often lost in the state-centered narratives of colonial expansion. -- L. Teh Choice 20120701

Between 1876 and 1945, thousands of Japanese civilians--merchants, traders, prostitutes, journalists, teachers, and adventurers--left their homeland for a new life on the Korean peninsula. Although most migrants were guided primarily by personal profit and only secondarily by national interest, their mundane lives and the state's ambitions were inextricably entwined in the rise of imperial Japan. Despite having formed one of the largest colonial communities in the twentieth century, these settlers and their empire-building activities have all but vanished from the public memory of Japan's presence in Korea. Drawing on previously unused materials in multi-language archives, Jun Uchida looks behind the official organs of state and military control to focus on the obscured history of these settlers, especially the first generation of "pioneers" between the 1910s and 1930s who actively mediated the colonial management of Korea as its grassroots movers and shakers. By uncovering the downplayed but dynamic role played by settler leaders who operated among multiple parties--between the settler community and the Government-General, between Japanese colonizer and Korean colonized, between colony and metropole--this study examines how these "brokers of empire" advanced their commercial and political interests while contributing to the expansionist project of imperial Japan.