The Proletarian Gamble

"This book establishes Ken C. Kawashima not simply as one of the best students of modern Japanese history in the world, but as one with a rare facility for effective use of theory amid a plethora of primary sources in Japanese and Korean. This book illustrates at once a very detailed daily life of Korean day workers in various Japanese cities, a study thoroughly at home with both modern Japanese and Korean history, and an author who is fully versed in a wide body of theory--Marx, Benjamin, Althusser, Foucault, Zi ek, and many others. It is simply the best book in East Asian history that I have read in many years."--Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago