Week 5 Discussion Questions

I think Kawashima decided to focus on the Soaikai to both illuminate that “Koreans” as a group were not a monolith with no dissenting ideas and also as Professor Matsumura mentioned, to try and outline why many labor/worker movements were not able to unite. Whether or not Pak Ch’um-gum and the Soaikai legitimately believed in their goal of weeding out the “thug” Koreans, they actively worked with the Japanese police to undermine many strikes carried out by workers and suppressed Korean liberation by forbidding movements to unite into a stronger and broader class consciousness. This demonstrates that within a single ethnicity there still remain competing interests and goals that contributed to the failure of workers to unite nationwide in their strike and labor efforts. I think the fact that the Taki Seihi strike did end up resulting in millet being equally distributed was a testament to the will of the workers in opposition to threating forces like the Soaikai. Indeed, their ability to have potentially also sparked a strike in Gimje indicates that the Soaikai were not as successful as Kawashima might have portrayed. In regards to the love story, I think it is an example of being able to transcend not only race but also your class conditions. They realized the abhorrent conditions that Korean workers were placed under, not to mention the scrutiny that an inter-racial couple might garner, and in order to try and forge a better life, they ran. As Professor Matsumura mentioned, it is also might be evidence to suggest that spaces of abolitionist capitalism that allowed for interactions between different racial groups and social classes were possible, but definite evidence is still lacking.