죽일 권리왿� 살릴 권리: 2차 대전 동안 미국인으로 살았던 일본인과 일본인으로 살았던 조선인들 (Right to Kill, Right to Make Live: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans During WWII)

While it is common to describe Japan and the United States during the Second World War as polar opposites, this essay argues that the material and ideological demands of fighting total war (especially the need to mobilize soldiers and workers; and to achieve dominance in the Asia Pacific) forced the two regimes to incorporate their colonial and minority subjects in strikingly similar ways. In both cases this led to a shift from “exclusionary” to “inclusionary” racism and a movement away from (albeit not the displacement of) what Michel Foucault has described as the deductive logic of the “right to kill” toward the productive logic of the “right to make live.” In keeping with this transformation, racism modulated away from its “vulgar” to a more “polite” form so that even as extreme brutality and violence against segments of these despised populations continued, the governing elite also manifested unprecedented concern for the life, reproduction, welfare, and sometimes even happiness of these same peoples. In an important way the legacy of the total war years remains with us, for as in that earlier moment, racism and its disavowal continue to haunt us in their uneasy compatibility.

While it is common to describe Japan and the United States during the Second World War as polar opposites, this essay argues that the material and ideological demands of fighting total war (especially the need to mobilize soldiers and workers; and to achieve dominance in the Asia Pacific) forced the two regimes to incorporate their colonial and minority subjects in strikingly similar ways. In both cases this led to a shift from “exclusionary” to “inclusionary” racism and a movement away from (albeit not the displacement of) what Michel Foucault has described as the deductive logic of the “right to kill” toward the productive logic of the “right to make live.” In keeping with this transformation, racism modulated away from its “vulgar” to a more “polite” form so that even as extreme brutality and violence against segments of these despised populations continued, the governing elite also manifested unprecedented concern for the life, reproduction, welfare, and sometimes even happiness of these same peoples. In an important way the legacy of the total war years remains with us, for as in that earlier moment, racism and its disavowal continue to haunt us in their uneasy compatibility.