Korean Colonial Migrants in Japan’s Postwar Black-Markets: Extralegality, Jurisdiction, Liberation

• In Event: The Colonial Korean Minority in 1940s Occupied Japan

Abstract

By August 1945, well over two million Koreans found themselves living and working on the Japanese home islands. Yet as hopes for peace and ‘liberation’ in late 1945 gradually faded, Koreans were increasingly faced with a choice between repatriation to a divided homeland or scraping together a livelihood in occupied postwar Japan. As economic and political conditions deteriorated on the Korean peninsula, fewer Koreans chose to repatriate and focused on survival in Japan, many of whom had to rely on the ubiquitous black-markets. This presentation traces the contours of colonial Korean and Taiwanese involvement in immediate postwar black-markets. It will consider the way in which an incomplete and interrupted American-directed decolonization process left Koreans and Taiwanese in Japan increasingly susceptible to global cold war politics, particularly Allied equivocations regarding their legal and economic status under Allied occupation in Japan. The black-markets emerged as an extralegal space occupied by a number of groups vying for jurisdictional control due predominantly to the Japanese authorities inability to distribute scarce food resources, and a police force unsure of their jurisdiction and powers. In this presentation I argue it was this very extralegality that precipitated the clarification of what defeat, liberation, jurisdiction, autonomy, justice and sovereignty actually meant for colonials in occupied Japan. The American and Japanese effort to bring the black markets’ extralegality under state control necessitated decisions to be made vis-à-vis colonial migrants’ legal status and social position in Japan.

Author

• Joel Matthews, New York University