Korean kuzuya, ‘German-style control’ and the business of waste in wartime Japan, 1931-1945

Chad B. Denton

Business History, 2022, vol. 64, issue 5, 904-922

Abstract: This article shows how wartime conditions transformed the waste business in Japan. Hygiene regulations from 1900 to the 1920s followed by an influx of Korean migrant labour disrupted the traditional waste trade. The conquest of Manchuria opened up new export markets for Japanese waste and increased the demand for munitions, causing scrap metal prices to skyrocket. These new economic conditions created opportunities for Korean-owned waste businesses. In 1938 the Japanese Ministry of Commerce and Industry imposed a control system on kuzuya scrap dealers consciously modelled on Nazi Germany to keep scrap prices as low as possible and to prevent criminal activity through extensive surveillance. These price controls privileged wholesalers and harmed waste-pickers; Koreans remained in the trade because of their cheap labour. Economic mobilization under conditions of total war after 1941 temporarily rehabilitated the marginalized image of kuzuya in government propaganda, but the end of the war shattered that illusion.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1080/00076791.2020.1857739

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