The Pacific War and Working Women in Late Colonial Korea

This paper describes the experiences of young Korean women being recruited to work in factories during the Japanese colonial era (1910-1945). Though Korean industrialization began about 1910, the military-industrial complex needed all the workers it could get during WWI & again during WWII, & many were women. The factory girls of the 1920s & 1930s have been portrayed as victims of capitalism, while during the late 1930s & early 1940s, many were recruited away from the factories to serve as "comfort women" or sex slaves for the Japanese military. This discussion of Korean women's work during 1937-1945 serves to explain their contributions to industrial production in the Japanese wartime empire; outline the policies & programs that placed industry & labor within the scope of imperial mobilization; elaborate on how female labor recruitment was performed; describe how the Women's Labor Volunteer Corps mobilized trainable female workers; &, drawing from the oral histories of these female volunteers, to illustrate some lesser known effects of Japan's total war in Korea. Appendixes, References. J. Stanton