This book presents a counter-argument to the widely held view that the Japanese have believed that they are a homogeneous nation since the Meiji period. Eiji Oguma demonstrates that the myth of ethnic homogeneity was not established during the Meiji period, nor during the Pacific War, but only after the end of the war. The study covers a large range of areas, including archaeology, ancient history, linguistics, anthropology, ethnology, folk law, eugenics and philosophy, to obtain an overview of how a variety of authors dealt with the theme of ethnicity. It also examines how this myth of homogeneity arose and how the peoples of such Japanese colonies as Korea and Taiwan were viewed in the pre-war literature on ethnic identity. This is the first English translation of A Genealogy of "Japanese" Self-Images, which won the Suntory Culture Award in 1996.

Korean workers in Japan constituted imperial Japan's largest colonial labour force in the 1920s and 1930s. Caught between the Scylla of agricultural destitution in Korea and the Charybdis of industrial depression in Japan, migrant Korean peasants arrived on Japanese soil amid extreme forms of precariousness in the labour and housing markets. For the migrant, becoming a worker in Japan was dependent on chance, on knowing or meeting the right people, on being in the right place at the right time. In "The Proletarian Gamble", Ken C. Kawashima maintains that contingent labour is a defining characteristic of capitalist commodity economies. He develops his argument by scrutinizing how the labour power of Korean workers in Japan was commodified, how they fought against the racist and contingent conditions of exchange, and how they combated institutionalized racism. Kawashima draws on previously unseen archival materials from interwar Japan as he describes how Korean migrants struggled against various recruitment practices, unfair and discriminatory wages, sudden firings, racist housing practices, and excessive bureaucratic red-tape. Demonstrating that there was no single Korean 'minority', he reveals how Koreans exploited fellow Koreans and how the stratification of their communities worked to the advantage of state and capital. However, Kawashima also describes how when migrant workers did organize, as when they became involved in Roso (the largest Korean communist labour union in Japan), and in Zenkyo (the Japanese communist labour union), their diverse struggles were united toward a common goal. In "The Proletarian Gamble", his analysis of the Korean migrant workers' experiences opens into a much broader re-thinking of the fundamental nature of capitalist commodity economies and the analytical categories of the proletariat, surplus populations, commodification, and state power.

出版社/著者からの内容紹介
日本全国をくまなく歩き，各地の民間伝承を克明に調査した著者（1907-81）が，辺境の地で黙々と生きてきた古老たちの存在を生き生きと描き，歴史の舞台に浮かび上がらせた宮本民俗学の代表作．（解説＝網野善彦） --このテキストは、 単行本 版に関連付けられています。
内容（「BOOK」データベースより）
昭和14年以来、日本全国をくまなく歩き、各地の民間伝承を克明に調査した著者(1907‐81)が、文化を築き支えてきた伝承者=老人達がどのような環境に生きてきたかを、古老たち自身の語るライフヒストリーをまじえて生き生きと描く。辺境の地で黙々と生きる日本人の存在を歴史の舞台にうかびあがらせた宮本民俗学の代表作。