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Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea: The Onoda Cement Factory. By Soon-Won Park. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. 325 pp. Maps, tables, figures, index. Cloth, $42.50. ISBN 0-674-14240-3.
Not long ago, it was widely believed that the only meaningful legacies of the period of Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1910-45) were the absence of trees on Korea's denuded hillsides and the abundance of bitter resentment (han) in the hearts of many Koreans. Consequently, South Korea's postwar industrialization, the so-called South Korean Miracle, was thought to have arisen Athena-like, fully formed out of the toil and sweat of Korean workers and the guidance of the state. In the past decade or so, however, a number of works have reexamined Japanese colonial rule in Korea and its relation to industrialization, modernity, and the development of capitalism in South Korea. Taken together, they constitute a vigorous challenge to many facets of our understanding of this period. Soon-Won Park's examination of the Onoda Cement complex in colonial-era Korea falls squarely within this revisionist camp. Not only does Park provide concise and useful summaries of this trend in scholarship (her reviews of Korean- and Japanese-language works are especially useful for readers who do not have access to such sources); she also demonstrates a powerful and compelling example of how the roots of Korean industrialization must be sought in the period of Japanese colonial rule.
Park's work focuses on an important Japanese enterprise, the Onoda Cement Company. The firm began in early Meiji Japan and grew with the expansion of the Japanese empire. By the end of the Second World War, Onoda had established twenty-six factories in Japan, Korea, Manchuria, and China. The plants in Korea constituted one of the oldest and largest industrial ventures...