Korean kuzuya, ‘German-style control’ and the business of waste in wartime Japan, 1931-1945

Abstract

This article shows how wartime conditions transformed the waste business in Japan. Hygiene regulations from 1900 to the 1920s followed by an influx of Korean migrant labour disrupted the traditional waste trade. The conquest of Manchuria opened up new export markets for Japanese waste and increased the demand for munitions, causing scrap metal prices to skyrocket. These new economic conditions created opportunities for Korean-owned waste businesses. In 1938 the Japanese Ministry of Commerce and Industry imposed a control system on kuzuya scrap dealers consciously modelled on Nazi Germany to keep scrap prices as low as possible and to prevent criminal activity through extensive surveillance. These price controls privileged wholesalers and harmed waste-pickers; Koreans remained in the trade because of their cheap labour. Economic mobilization under conditions of total war after 1941 temporarily rehabilitated the marginalized image of kuzuya in government propaganda, but the end of the war shattered that illusion.

Keywords:

• Japanese economy
• Nazi Germany
• waste
• Korean migrants
• recycling

Acknowledgements

For their helpful comments and suggestions, I would like to thank Heike Weber, Sabine Frühstück, the two anonymous reviewers, and the participants of the June 2018 ‘Waste, Recycling, War and Occupation’ workshop held at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. I am particularly grateful to Chizuru Araya who located and translated primary and secondary source material in Japanese.

Notes on contributor

Chad Denton is an associate professor of history at the Underwood International College of Yonsei University, in Seoul, South Korea. He received his doctorate in history in 2009 at the University of California, Berkeley and his research focuses on the transnational history of the Second World War in occupied Europe, Japan, and the South Pacific. He has published articles in French Historical Studies, Contemporary European History, War & Society, The Journal of Pacific History, and The Seoul Journal of Korean Studies and he received the Malcolm Bowie Prize in 2015.

Notes

1 The usage of these four terms—tateba, kuzuya, shikiriya, and bataya—varied considerably over time and space and a proliferation of other designations, both formal and informal, fill out the hierarchy from the professional wholesalers at the top to the waste pickers at the bottom. For a detailed discussion see Nonaka & Hoshino, 1973, pp. 35–40.

2 On the complicated question of the presence or absence of Koreans in Japanese government ‘total war’ propaganda see Kim, 2020.

3 The lack of archival sources is related not only to the destruction of wartime records (as occurred in Germany) but also to the historical lack of centralized, public archives in Japan. The National Archives of Japan were only created in 1971 and the Public Archives Law was only passed in 1988. See Ogawa, 1991.

4 On the oyabun-kobun relationship see Ishino, 1953.

5 The cabinet-level agencies reflected the desire of the Japanese government to unify planning from the top. The Resources Agency, staffed primarily with civilian bureaucrats, was originally established in 1927 to develop plans for national mobilization, while the Planning Agency was created in 1935 to expand production (Mimura, 2011, p. 20).

6 Statistics on the Korean community produced by the Police Affairs bureau counted 87,497 Koreans living in Tokyo prefecture in 1940, with 5188 working in the second-hand goods or scrap trade. The 1940 census gave the population for Tokyo prefecture to be 7,345,971 and the population of Tokyo city to be 6,778,804 (Home Ministry, 1972; 1940 Population Census of Japan, p. 100).

7 For a different interpretation of this roundtable conversation that does not consider the chairman’s defense of the Korean members, see Kimura, 2017, p. 74.