Jun Uchida

Another work that I've been meaning to read pretty much since it has been published, but have only now gotten to. Though I do have to admit that I'm happy that I read S.M. Jager's "The Other Great Game" first.

Essentially, the agenda here is to tease out the role of the Japanese settler community in the conquest of Korea, which has been repressed in the years since defeat in 1945. What Ms. Uchida finds is a group of people who were always in a somewhat marginal position, for all their show more economic ascendancy in Korea, as being overseas Japanese residents they had no official rights (such as they were), vis-a-vis the Imperial administrative apparatus, while still being quite dependent on Tokyo. This is at the same time that they were trying to avoid absorption into the Korean population mass. Much was their sense of nervous self-congratulation.

Where this book really kicks into high gear is with the the so-called Manchurian Incident of 1931, as Uchida gives the reader a good sense of how Japanese military aggression offered something for everyone as a unifying platform; the economic depth for Tokyo, and an agenda that both the Korean and Japanese communities of Korea could get behind. What it mostly meant is an acceleration of the more fascistic visions of Greater Japan as one social organism. Although the irony there is that Koreans were very adept at using terminal Japanese imperial rhetoric as an avenue for demanding more rights; much to the horror of the settler community. This is until empire came crashing down in smoke and ruin in 1945.

I got a great deal out of this work but it's probably not the first book one should read about the Japanese empire. As mentioned, "The Other Great Game" should probably come first, followed by Lori Watt's "When Empire Comes Home;" then read Uchida. show less