HIEA 112 Week 3
Think about the relationship between post-World War One capitalist crisis (elaborated by Young), transformations in colonial policy (examined in lecture 6), and new conflicts that emerged between colonial subjects and ordinary Japanese people as a result. Does thinking in these terms help us make sense of the 1923 massacre of 6,000 Korean people living in mainland Japan by a combination of police and vigilantes who took it upon themselves to kill the “unsacrificeable (see Ryang’s homo sacer)” people in their midst?
After World War One, Japan’s manufacturers “rapidly expanded” due to the “withdrawal of European textile and light industrial producers” (Young 16). It expanded because they were in need of these resources that they had before but suddenly lost. Due to the the expansion, the economy started to change. More jobs started becoming available and the population started to increase and trade started to become more abundant. All of these changes also meant that the price of various things increased which caused the gap between the rich and poor to widen since the poor couldn’t afford anything (Young 19).
Colonial rule also started to change after the Tapani incident. The changes made different colonies “separate entities” of Japan (lecture 6). This created a distance between the people of the different colonies and the people that lived in Japan. It also created a distinction between everyone, creating a sense of superiority in some cases.
The changes in the economy and colonial policy played a role in the massacre of many Koreans after the 1923 earthquake. After the earthquake many started to blame the Koreans for things they couldn’t explain because of a lack of reliable information (Ryang 732). This is similar to the Black Death where many innocent groups of people and minorities were killed and blamed for the unknown. The blaming of the Koreans started as a rumor of someone spotting some Koreans holding what they thought were bombs and poison (Ryang 733). With the paranoia of the unknown mixed with seeing these people holding strange objects, word started to float around that it was their fault that the Japanese were suffering. Another factor was that some Japanese though that Koreans were taking jobs from them (Ryang 737). With the inflation of prices, it was hard for some to be able to afford the cost of living in Japan, making them feel wronged that some foreigners had jobs but they didn’t. In addition, the separation of the different colonies disturbed any sense of community that was previously there, not stopping anyone from morally feeling wrong in killing all of the Koreans. A sense of superiority over the Koreans also could’ve brought the massacre.
