Korean Workers and the Japanese Nitrogen Fertilizer Company

Abstract

This paper aims to examine how Korean workers in the colonized

Korea earned skills in response to the Japan-led industrialization

in the 1930s. The previous studies of others envisioned

the employment structure in the industrialization process

as the stratification of the Japanese skilled workers including

engineers and managers, vs. the Korean unskilled workers.

However, as school' 'education and on-the-job training

spread out in the process of industrialization, we can clearly

witness the tendency of Korean workers becoming skilled workers

and then engineers, even though the portion of Korean

workers who became highly-skilled workers and managers was

small, mainly due to the favoritism given to the Japanese students,

and partly due to the inexperience of Korean workers

who faced a sudden industrialization. The observation that the

Korean workers were competent enough to become skilled

workers even under the Japanese rule may shed some light on

the study of initial conditions of the Korean development after

the 1960s.