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In This Issue
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Scott
North
Jung-Sun
Han
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Greetings!
The debate over Abenomics has focused on issues of economic
growth. Scott North makes clear the implications for worker rights and
social inequality through analysis of contemporary debates over plans for
transforming worker rights through a program of limited regular employment
designed to eliminate Japan's controversial 'lifetime employment system'.
Korea's Japanese colonial rulers established their presence, among other
things by destroying a primary symbol of the Korean monarchy and building
the central colonial administrative building on its site. As Jung-Sun Han
demonstrates, the site would be the crux of subsequent political struggles
over the decades, eventually resulting in reclamation of the royal site by
Korean nationalists. The struggles reveal much about the politics and
historical memory of colonial and postcolonial Korea.
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Scott North
Limited Regular
Employment and the Reform of Japan's Division of Labor
Responses to Japanese
Prime Minister Abe's proposed labor reforms, which are associated with the
economic stimulus plan hyped as "Abenomics," offer a window on
the major debates over Japan's future. North summarizes and analyzes six
responses to new rules that would encourage expansion of "limited
regular employment," an employment status between Japan's famous
"lifetime employment" and the burgeoning number of non-regular
often part-time workers.
Proponents in the business community and government tout limited regular
employment (gentei
seiki koyou) as a way to introduce flexibility and mobility in
the labor market, boosting productivity, and helping stem the bifurcation
of Japanese society into winners, with regular employment, and losers, with
non-regular jobs. Opponents, however, see the proposed reforms as an
ominous step toward dismantling Japan's already weak worker protections.
They argue that limited regular employment is a poison pill containing
inherent contradictions that threaten the hopes of women and younger
workers for stable careers, while loosening long-standing social and legal
constraints on employers' right to dismiss workers. Parliamentary debate on
this legislation is set for the summer of 2014.
Scott North is Professor
of Sociology in the School of Human Sciences at Osaka University. He is the
author of The
Work-Family Dilemmas of Japan's Salarymen, in Men, Wage Work and Family,
edited by Paula McDonald and Emma Jeanes (Routledge, 2012) and other papers
on work and family life in Japan.
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Jung-Sun Han
Japan in the public
culture of South Korea, 1945-2000s:
The making and
remaking of colonial sites and memories
This article examines
public memory of Japanese colonial rule in South Korea by focusing on the
site of the former Japanese Government-General Building (GGB) in Seoul.
Completed in 1926, the GGB, built on the site of one of the most
important royal palaces of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910), the Kyŏngbok,
bore witness both to the colonial and postcolonial periods of modern Korean
history. The colonial administration began construction of the GGB in
1916 and completed it in 1926. For nearly two decades, until 1945, the
building housed offices of the colonial government. The building then
survived a further five decades of Korea's turbulent post-liberation
history before its demolition in the early 1990s.
In exploring these questions, the author briefly summarizes the history of
the GGB before analysing the political context for the official decision to
demolish the GGB in the early 1990s, reflected in the media, at two levels:
reaction from 'specialists' of various kinds (architects, city planners,
and so forth), and the general public. Han uses the history of the GGB as a
template for revealing changing attitudes and memories in contemporary Korean
society with respect to Japan and the colonial past.
Dr. Jung-Sun Han is
an Associate Professor in the Division of International Studies, Korea
University, Seoul. Han has worked on the interwar and wartime Japanese
political thought and Japan-Korea relations through the lens of visual
culture of modern Japan.
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