Korean Workers and the Japanese Nitrogen Fertilizer Company

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.