International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

 In this book, by examining migrant Korean workers in Japan in the period between the two world wars, Ken Kawashima argues that commodity capitalism in Japan depended on a social and institutional network that created a surplus pool of "day laborers" whose day-to-day existence, from finding food to finding housing, was defined by its precariousness and its racist overtones, and thus made these laborers ripe for exploitation. The situation of day laborers, or temp workers—those who have no regular salaried jobs—is a global phenomenon  for which the  "floating population" of Koreans in 1920s and 1930s Japan serves as an instructive precursor. Regrettably,  most existing labor history concentrates on a "proletariat" already engaged in factory work, and thus misses examining the situation and affects of those laborers who are perpetually in and out of the labor force.

In a series of detailed chapters, Kawashima examines how Japanese industries following the manufacturing boom at the end of World War I recruited Korean peasants to use as a lever against high-wage \-earning Japanese trade union workers.  He then shows how the Japanese legal system enforced the historically racist polices of Japanese landlords against Koreans. Although other works on this period have shown that racism existed in Japanese housing markets, Kawashima explains how and in what forms racism operated within these markets, as well as in the legal systems that mediated housing disputes. He goes on to document how the Japanese "Unemployment Emergency Relief Programs" not only did not provide any relief, but reinforced the insecurity of Korean workers through a Kafkaesque bureaucracy and registration process, forcing Koreans out of factory jobs and into large public works projects—paving roads, toiling in gravel pits laying track, building tunnels, and other dangerous work.  Finally, Kawashima catalogs the failure of the positivist, empirical, sociologizing social science by which the Japanese amassed mountains of statistical surveys on the Koreans in Japan, all of which in effect ultimately reduced the social and economic problems experienced by Koreans to a problem of the Koreans themselves, and not of the context in which they were obliged to exist.