Gender and Labour in Korea and Japan provides an incisive look into the dynamics of key economic, political, and cultural transformations in contemporary Korea and Japan. Whether examining the Japanese state's imperial policies or Korea's fin-de-siècle financial crisis, the editors of this volume astutely point out that any attempt to understand Korea and Japan's long twentieth century would be remiss without accounting for the ways in which gender and sexuality have been inextricably interlinked with labor, class, nation building, and empire. Coeditors Ruth Barraclough and Elyssa Faison underscore their central point by assembling an impressive collection of historical, anthropological, and literary studies that impart breadth and depth to the gendered and sexualized dimensions of capitalism.

Heather Bowen-Struyk's chapter sets the tone of the volume by speaking directly to the book's subtitle, “sexing class.” By recognizing the similarities between the abject plight of the prostitute and the proletariat, working-class men such as the protagonist in the Japanese short story “The Prostitute” (1925) become conscious of their class condition. Yet, by seeing prostituted women as a “symbol of the entire oppressed class,” as opposed to fellow comrades engaged in sexual labor, they deny women the agency to define their own realities. Pitting male sexual desire against class politics not only undermines women's subjectivities, but also perpetuates gender divisions and hierarchies in working-class politics—issues that both Hwasook Nam and Jong Bum Kwon discuss in their later chapters. Barraclough's analysis of the autobiographical literature of South Korean working-class women in the late 1970s and 1980s highlights the importance of women's subjectivities in deepening our understanding of the nature of late capitalism. Barraclough argues that the sheer act of reading and writing provided an escape for “factory girls” toiling in South Korea's export-oriented manufacturing sector. Yet the narratives they wrote also revealed the perils of the romance economy and the seeming intransigence of class and status boundaries between working-class women and middle-class university men, divisions that were just as integral to reproducing the capitalist order as those between labor and capital.

In their discussions of South Korean union politics, Nam and Kwon illustrate the limits and possibilities of transgressing boundaries of gender and sexuality. Nam's case study of a shipbuilding union during the 1980s provides a detailed account how one woman, Kim Chinsook, became the only female from the rank-and-file to win a leadership position in a male-dominated union. Kim was able to do this by rejecting workplace norms that prohibited young, unmarried women from engaging in physical labor in close proximity to men and by earning the trust of fellow male workers as a skilled and competent welder. Although Kim's work ethic and personality were often deemed exceptional, her ascent up the union ranks was made possible by mundane familial roles that allowed male co-workers to embrace her as a young daughter instead of an object of sexual desire or scorn.

The influence of normative ideas about gender and the family also circumscribed union politics in Kwon's account of a two-year struggle waged by Daewoo workers in the aftermath of the 1997–98 financial crisis. In the context of highly charged, emotional protests aimed at reclaiming workers' jobs, Kwon discusses the central role played by workers' wives in recasting labor struggles in terms of gender and the family. Yet, by repeatedly emphasizing men's worth as wage-earning husbands and fathers and women's worth as supportive caretakers, protesting workers' wives reproduced the symbolic basis of a patriarchal order in which men were the sole and primary breadwinners. This ideology not only reified existing gender hierarchies but also belied the actual realities facing unemployed men and female heads of households.

Faison addresses the rigidities of such gendered ideologies in her chapter about Japan's wartime mobilization in the 1930s and 1940s. The Japanese imperial state's “good wife, wise mother” ideology clashed with the need to recruit industrial and sexual labor for its factories and “comfort stations.” Thus, the Japanese state utilized a “complex calculus” considering age, marital status, and educational status for its wartime labor needs, with poor and uneducated Korean women disproportionately recruited to work as military sexual slaves. Women's sexual labor was central in supporting Japan's wartime as well as postwar efforts, explains Chunghee Sarah Soh. For example, Japan's military “comfort stations” were converted into special “R & R” (rest and recuperation) facilities for American soldiers under the rationale that foreign military personnel needed a diversion from assaulting “respectable” Japanese women. In South Korea, prostitution near U.S. military bases not only promoted geopolitical relations but also provided the economy with much-needed foreign currency to jump-start national economic growth. Both Soh and Haeng-Ja Sachiko Chung caution readers, however, not to simplify the complexities and contradictions of women's sexual labor. Soh points out that the Korean military's comfort system has not generated the same outcries from the Korean public as the Japanese military's comfort system. Chung emphasizes that ethnic categories and gender roles often obscure, rather than clarify, the workplace organization of sexual labor in places such as Korean “hostess clubs” in Japan.

If I were to identify one weakness, it is the lack of a concluding chapter. Given the volume's engagement with a wide range of important topics, some suggestions for future research and inquiry would have been helpful. Regardless, the coeditors should be commended for compiling a collection of in-depth, well-researched, and well-written contributions covering a broad historical range and a variety of disciplinary perspectives. It is a volume that should be a staple in any course on contemporary Korea and Japan and would also be valuable in topical courses on gender and sexuality.