Brokers of Empire : Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945, by Jun Uchida

Shortly after the Treaty of Kanghwa was executed in 1876, a few Japanese moved to the Korean peninsula to take advantage of the provision that permitted Japanese to reside and conduct trade in three newly opened ports.They were the pioneers of a community of Japanese settlers in Korea that by 1945 came to number over 700,000 (a figure that excludes 200,000 Japanese military in Korea).Jun Uchida rescues these settlers from historical obscurity in her impeccably researched monograph Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876Korea, -1945. .The word "brokers" in her title signals her thesis: these ordinary people acted as intermediaries in many of the transactions that determined the political, economic, and social development of Korea from the end of Chosn rule through the era of Japanese colonial government.This book goes a long way toward correcting a distortion in previous accounts of this period.With very rare exceptions, the settlers have been overlooked.Researchers have focused on bureaucrats, policemen, and expatriate business leaders on the Japanese side, and independence activists, ethnic nationalist passive resisters, and collaborators on the Korean side."Tremendous diversity"-in class, social status, income, and occupation-characterized Japanese migrants to Korea (p.64).Uchida came to appreciate this by reading deeply and widely in published and unpublished sources in both Japanese and Korean.Her staggeringly extensive bibliography will impress the most exacting of professional historians, and she marshals it masterfully.Moreover, she writes from an informed comparative perspective, having steeped herself in the literature on European imperialism, particularly recent work on settler colonialism.Brokers of Empire speaks directly to researchers on European interventions in Africa and Asia as well as to historians of East Asia.Japanese on the peninsula, "like the French in Algeria, stood out in fully replicating the metropolitan social hierarchy (including its lowest strata) in a single territory" (p.66).While they mirrored the society of the homeland, however, settlers were inevitably affected by the different milieu.From 1910 to 1945, Korea was a space where "the colonizer and the colonized adopted each other's customs, habits, and values, transforming each other's culture, if unevenly and unconsciously, in the process" (p.85).Many settlers became concerned about preserving Japanese identity, fearing that their community might fall into a "hazy, intermediate realm" that was neither Japanese nor Korean.Self-conscious efforts to maintain a Japanese lifestyle culminated, in extreme instances, in some settlers living in a sort of quarantine from the surrounding Korean society and economy.