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Japan’s wartime use of colonial labor: Taiwan and Korea (1937-1945)

University of British Columbia

The wartime Japanese empire used various types of foreign labor in order to fuel its war machine. In many of its areas of wartime control, Japan carried out what can be described as a policy of outright slave labor. However, in its formal colonies (Korea and Taiwan), the Japanese wartime empire mobilized its colonial labor within the "same" legal framework that was applied to the Japanese, and it mobilized the colonial subjects with an explicitly assimilationist slogan of serving the empire as self-sacrificing subjects. This paper attempts to present an overall, if fragmentary, picture of Japan's wartime utilization of colonial labor in Korea and Taiwan. It argues that despite Japan's use of assimilationist rhetoric, the nature of Japan's labor mobilization was very coercive and brutal. As a result, there was a substantial level of resistance from the colonial population, which intensified toward the war's end; and Japan's-mobilization of colonial labor met constant frustration throughout the war. The paper first discusses how empire-wide legal and administrative frameworks for mobilization were developed and applied for labor mobilization within Korea and Taiwan. As a part of its empire-wide mobilization, Japan mobilized colonial labor outside the colonies. The paper discusses this dimension with a particular focus on Japan's use of Korean labor in Japan.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-05-26

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/8187

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