Jun Uchida's Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945 was developed out of a Ph.D. thesis at Harvard University (according to the Acknowledgements under the supervision of Andrew Gordon). The background of this doctoral project has left its clear traces in the monograph: voluminous, thorough, and rich in detail. This most certainly should not be taken as a critique. At no point have I found the argument of the book to be long-winded or digressive. On the contrary, excursions into detail (a personal story, a side-comment) are to the point and underline the fact that Brokers of Empire is a book the scholarly community has long been waiting for. Putting it into the perspective of literature on the Japanese colonization of Korea, I must add that it is beyond doubt one of the best, if not the best, work I have read in many years.
This assessment is supported by the fact that Brokers of Empire manages to cater to several novel approaches towards the topic of empire and imperialism. First, it connects to and extends the tradition of research highlighting the “multidirectional” nature of imperialism, or the fact that imperialism does not merely define and transform the colonized, but also plays an active role in shaping the colonizer. In the context of Japanese imperialism, I mention the works of Louise Young (Japan's Total Empire), Kenneth Ruoff (Imperial Japan at Its Zenith), Ken Kawashima (The Proletarian Gamble), and the like.Footnote 1 It is obvious that Japanese settlers in Korea directly incorporated the mechanisms through which empire building developed “metropolitan effects”: they were, as Uchida eloquently demonstrates, by their very nature, obliged to imagine and enact the (impossible?) boundaries between colonizer and colonized in a setting dominated by the discourse of unity (naisen-ittai).
We should at the same time not lose sight of the fact that, within the study of colonialism, settler colonialism itself has also grown into a distinct and respectable tradition of its own (the existence of the journal as Settler Colonial Studies testifying to the latter). Besides the fact that not much work on Japanese settler colonialists has been published in English, I strongly feel Uchida must be credited for using the tradition's innate comparative scope, setting the Japanese experience in the wider background of similar, albeit non-identical histories, as for instance the French colons in Algeria. The comparative aspect is still too often absent from existing research in Japanese. Obviously, Uchida manages to present a clear overview of works in Japanese, something for which future researchers will be grateful.
Brokers of Empire is elegantly structured into three parts, themselves composed of two or more chapters. Chapter 1 sets the stage. From an anecdotal reference to Kobayashi Genroku, whose career functions as a remarkable microcosm or micro-history of the wider experiment with imperialism, Uchida shows how narrative and reality, imagination and the making of the Greater Japan were always tightly connected. The brokers of empire may have vanished from memory, but they were among the most potent tools of colonial power (a “middle group”, in Uchida's words), although fragile ones (p. 8). The chapter further elucidates the settler colonialist's wrought ideological position: oscillating between assimilation and autonomy, and always reminded of their relative weakness vis-à-vis the colonial state. Importantly, Uchida also distinguishes three stages of settler colonialism, which are developed in the following chapters:
1. the formative phase, until the early 1910s (Chapter 2)
2. the struggle with the Korean independence movement (1919–1931) (Chapters 3–6)
3. the impact of the Manchurian incident (1931–1945) (Chapters 7–8)
I do not consider it particularly useful to list the content of each chapter, so I limit my remarks to what I found noteworthy. First then, I should note Uchida's choice to have several chapters, their chronological order notwithstanding, cover interrelated yet different aspects of Japanese settler colonialism. Chapter 2, for instance, inquires into the asymmetric gains (and losses) of empire for respectively the settlers and the state, thus developing a strong compatibility with my own research on Japanese money doctoring before World War II.Footnote 2 Uchida touches on an important point that needs more elucidation in future studies: Japanese imperialism should not be treated as one monolithic unity, but composed of a multiplicity of actors, all with their own agendas, sometimes hampering the larger objectives set by the colonial authorities. Indeed, the interaction of all parties involved often led to the erosion of the objectives of one or more parties, or even the larger objectives set by the political elite in Tokyo. In any case, pluriformity of the colonizer was a strong propeller of evolution and change in the relationship between Japan proper and Korea.
Personally, I found Chapter 4 one of the strongest of the monograph. Here, Uchida turns to a dimension of Japanese empire-building that is one of the most difficult to grasp, yet contains many of the paradoxes empowering the fast follow-up and evolution of imperial policy versus the Korean policy: the “semantic” dimension, so to speak, more specifically with regard to defining Korea and the Koreans within the Japanese imperial set-up. Several readers may find an affinity here with the work of Oguma Eiji on Japanese self-descriptions (or at least, I did so when rethinking the chapter). It is obvious that the peripheral role of the settler colonialists produced a discourse that was fundamentally at odds, at several times, with the official rhetoric in Tokyo. Uchida documents how the settler's conceptual journal led to very material realizations: the birth of the “colonial archive”, for instance, as an expression of Japan's quest to find the roots of Korean “political failure” (factionalism). And again, she is sensitive to the inevitable fissures within the Japanese discourse on Korea these efforts would produce.
As the format of the book review demands, the reviewer should pay attention to the real or possible caveats a book under review contains, but I am, in this case, reluctant to do so. Brokers of Empire is a very fine book written by a very fine scholar, and I feel I have been fortunate to be able to review it for this journal. Indeed, this book should be in the hands of all those who are serious about studying Japanese imperialism in Korea or elsewhere; and it comes highly recommended for anyone seeking to clarify many of the crucial issues to be looked into when researching imperialism and colonialism in general.
