Week 5
- Why do you think Kawashima insists on focusing on the suppression of Korean workers in Japan by Soaikai, a Korean welfare organization in his piece?
Ken C. Kawashima, in “The Obscene, Violent Supplement of State Power: Korean Welfare and Class Welfare in Interwar Japan,” reveals the prevalence of racial discrimination towards minority groups during Japanese colonization of Korea.
To begin with, Roso was one of the largest labor unions in Japan made up of Korean communists. Its members demonstrated against the unemployment bureaus for favoring Japanese over Korean workers. Soaikai is a“welfare organization specializing in Korean workers’’ (466). Its goal was to persuade Koreans to join Soaikai instead of Roso. The Kawasaki Soaikai incident was when members of Soaikai tried to forcefully recruit new members by waiting after they came home from work. Soaikai threatened them with weapons and kidnapped several of the workers. Members from both groups were arrested, but those from Soaikai were soon released.
He argues that the historical significance of the incident is that it “compels us to move well beyond cut-and-dried oppositions between state power and marginalized, colonial minority” (467). When we see history with us versus them mentality, we fail to pick up on its nuances. History is much more complicated than colonizer vs. colonized, state vs. people, or Japanese vs. Korean.
Furthermore, he adds that “attention needs to be drawn to how state power itself is divided internally and along lines that reveal a public face and a disavowed…supplementary force, one that operates in secretive and clandestine ways” (467). In this example, state power is internally through Pak Ch’um-gum and the Kawasaki Soaikai incident. Ch’um-gum, a cofounder of Soaikai, was the first Korean to be elected to the National Diet. He argued against the racial discrimination of Koreans and their need for basic human rights (“public face”). And even though Soaikai was created with good intentions, it only reinforced the idea of Japanese privilege and racial capitalism (“supplementary force”).
I believe that Kawashima focuses on the suppression of Korean workers by a “welfare organization” because he wanted to complicate the reader’s understanding of opposition within history and reinforce the existence of racial discrimination of minority groups within Japan.
2. What questions does his analysis raise about the way we might think about both the Taki Seihi strike and the love story between Mr. Kim and Matsuo Shina discussed in the lecture?
How do states exercise power over people? Which way is more effective?
What are the “innocent Korean” and the “unruly Korean”? What do these say about the public perceptions of Koreans during the time?
3. What are ways that you might think about their relationship beyond its representation as an inter-racial love story as stated in the newspaper account?
The newspaper published an article about Mr. Kim and Matsuo Shina even though the nature of their relationship was unclear. They could have been lovers, but it also could have a kidnapping or a relationship between friends. I believe that their story represents something greater than just a story between two lovers. Rather, it represents the complicated relationship between the Japanese and Koreans at the time.
