The Korea Now Podcast #99 – Michael Kim – ‘Industrial Warriors and Recognizing Religions - Everyday Life in Colonial Korea’

<p>This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Michael Kim. They speak about the arrival and place of Western missionaries in Korea before Japanese colonisation, the confrontations and accommodations that occurred between the missionaries and the colonial state, the system of ‘officially’ recognising religions within colonial Korea, and how the missionaries became institutionalised through social work; they also speak about the struggles that the Japanese war-machine had in keeping-up industrial production, the ways in which colonial Korea was seen as a potential new source of this production, the creation of military awards (industrial warriors) for workers as a reward and incentive for this, the ways in which Koreans were coerced and recruited to industrial labour, the type of ideological persuasion and material incentives used, and the elaborate ways that the colonial state sought to control and restructure everyday life.</p> <p>Michael Kim is Associate Professor of Korean History at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of International Studies in Seoul, Korea. His research primarily focuses on colonial Korea, and he has published on various aspects of urban culture, print culture, colonial economy, Korean collaboration, migration, and wartime mobilization. He is co-editor, along with Michael Schoenhals and Yong Woo Kim, of Mass Dictatorship and Modernity (Palgrave, 2013).</p> <p><em>*Michael Kim’s academic research can be found at: <a href= "https://yonsei.academia.edu/MichaelKim">Michael Kim | Yonsei University - Academia.edu</a></em></p> <p><em>*** Industrial Warriors: Labour Heroes and Everyday Life in Wartime Colonial Korea, 1937-1945 (<a href= "https://www.academia.edu/9065085/_Industrial_Warriors_Labour_Heroes_and_Everyday_Life_in_Wartime_Colonial_Korea_1937_1945_in_Alf_Ludtke_ed_Mass_Dictatorship_Collusion_and_Evasion_in_Everyday_Life_Palgrave_2016_126_146">(PDF) •"Industrial Warriors: Labour Heroes and Everyday Life in Wartime Colonial Korea, 1937-1945”