'We Go on Our Own Boats!': Korean Migrants and the Politics of Transportation Infrastructure in the Japanese Empire

“’We Go on Our Own Boats!’: The Pusan-Shimonoseki Ferry and the Politics of Transportation Infrastructure in the Japanese Empire,” highlights the spatial politics of labor migration under colonialism. The article examines how transportation infrastructure between occupied-Korea and Japan established a shifting border that both formatted migrants and came to be the site of their resistance. The article examines how transportation networks exerted a formative function that ensured the subaltern commodification of Korean migrant workers. Unlike the staple narrative of ever tighter colonial integration between the metropole and peninsula, I argue that maritime infrastructure functioned as a de facto border that mandated uneven labor relations as a condition of passage for Korean migrants bound for work in Japan. The paper also shows how, with an awareness of this dynamic, workers employed a range of tactics and strategies of resistance to realize their demand to travel as they wished.