For all of the recent attention “empire” is receiving in Japanese studies, there are still glaring omissions. At the beginning of her comprehensive and award-winning monograph, Jun Uchida argues that one significant group is Japanese settlers in Korea, who have been neglected in Japanese history because they were outside of the boundaries of metropolitan Japan and vilified in Korean history as civilian agents of the Government-General of Korea. But these settlers deserve a study of their own. Not merely the agents and proxies of the Government-General, these migrants—some of who arrived decades before colonization—played a crucial role in developing the shape and contours that Japan's colonization of Korea ultimately took. Particularly for what Uchida calls “brokers of empire,” those settlers who wed their fortunes to this key colony while asserting their continued relevance as Japanese imperial subjects, their personal travails and triumphs mirrored the story of empire itself. Even though this interpretation of historic events was not shared by their government, or metropolitan society for that matter, it is this perspective that drives Uchida's study.
Uchida also seeks to restore the centrality of these “brokers” in Japan's history. Thus, their relationship with the Japanese state—first represented by the metropolitan government, then the Resident and finally the Government-General—serves as the central point of tension. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce these settlers, their world, and the diverse ways they insinuated themselves, at times with tragic consequences, into shaping the course of Japanese intrusion in Korea. Not only does this focus enable an understanding of how “ordinary Japanese” shaped empire, Uchida suggests, but this also reveals how what she calls “subalterns of a modernizing nation” “became Japanese on the colonial periphery” (p. 36). In other words, the construction of a Japanese imperial identity occurred outside of metropolitan Japan's boundaries as much as it did within, and the struggles that characterized the relationship between subjects and the state were mirrored in the colonies, often with even greater antagonism.
At the same time, Uchida also emphasizes the degree to which both settlers and government officials engaged with (or were engaged by) the Koreans among whom they lived. She marks the March First movement and its aftermath as the pivotal moment that fundamentally transformed how settlers viewed Koreans, leading to greater interaction, intellectual debates in the pages of newly proliferating print media, and occasionally uneasy alliances when settler and Korean elite interests seemed to converge. She also traces the ways in which the March First movement's impact on governing policy—the transition from so-called Military to Cultural Rule under Saitō Makoto—also changed these settlers' contentious relationship with the Government-General.
In chapters 5 and 6, Uchida addresses two key areas where Japanese settler and Korean elite concerns converged: economic policy and representative politics. For settlers and Korean elites alike, the Government-General's reluctance to promote industrial development—in keeping with metropolitan policy designating Korea one of Japan's “bread baskets”—threatened to constrain and even diminish economic growth. Politically, the lack of suffrage for all colonial residents regardless of ethnicity struck settlers as a grave injustice. The demand for a political voice, while initially seeming to offer common ground for these brokers and Korean elites, however, prompted renewed efforts even by moderate nationalists to pursue Korean independence.
In the last two chapters, Uchida addresses the significant impact Japan's final acts of imperial expansion and aggression had on settlers in Korea. Japan's seizure of Manchuria and the establishment of the puppet state Manchukuo, she argues, promised a new solution to some of the challenges these brokers faced over the preceding decades, from new economic opportunities to the supposedly elevated social status of Japanese and Korean migrants in Manchukuo. The outbreak of war with China further transformed conditions in Korea, as it did in all other parts of the Japanese empire. With the implementation of “kōminka,” or imperialization, the distinctions between Japanese settlers and Koreans were further collapsed and made invisible, at least to the ever-present gaze of the colonial bureaucracy. Eager to demonstrate their suitability as true imperial subjects, brokers of empire also attempted to demonstrate their indispensability to the nation by enthusiastically supporting total wartime mobilization and moral suasion campaigns to transform both Japanese settlers and Koreans into truly worthy imperial subjects.
Uchida's study is comprehensive, thoroughly researched in multilingual archives, and written with authority. It is a significant contribution to the study of the Japanese empire, and will most certainly be the authoritative work on Japanese settler colonialism for the foreseeable future. At the same time, despite the daunting scale, chronological and thematic coverage, and even comparative gestures she makes, this is ultimately a study of a specific subset of Japanese settlers in Korea. However they first arrived in Korea, whatever circuitous or serendipitous route and set of circumstances resulted in their migration, these were the settlers who “made it,” whose combination of resources, adventurousness, risk taking, luck, or even pluck, reaped substantial economic, social, and cultural rewards. They may have felt maligned and embattled by the Government-General and resented what they perceived to be advantages given to Koreans that were denied them, but these were not, as Uchida herself acknowledges, a representative group, but instead the most elite of this community. Thus, the scale and aspirations of this work belie the common difficulty with restoring certain marginalized groups to mainstream history: there are often still yet other marginalized groups who, due to scarcity of sources or difficulty of representation, continue to be excluded. The inclusion of Korean perspectives is a welcome addition, but the Koreans who are given a voice are the same ones who caught the attention of these brokers of empire a century ago, elites who shared more in common with their Japanese counterparts than with their compatriots. Even while this study considerably expands the narrative of Japanese colonialism, it does so in a way that perhaps too closely reflects the perspectives of the brokers of empire themselves, without sufficiently acknowledging the anxieties, tensions, and struggles that characterized these experiences.
