Numerical Perception and Statistical Desire of Postwar Japan towards Resources in Korea

After defeat in the Second World War, Japan was faced with the issue of how to reconstruct its economic relationships with the regions of the East Asian regional economy of the Japanese Empire, i.e. relationships with Japan and the old ‘overseas territories.’ This article aims to analyze the resources that Japan recognized as being ‘lost’ after the war, and the attempt to express the resources that were still deemed to be necessary by Japan by using of ‘objective numerical figures.’ Although it is not possible to identify the objective process in producing these statistics, this article looks at the statistics Japan collected immediately after the war and analyzes the quality and quantity of the resources acquired from Chos?n during the war. The purpose is to examine the meaning of Japan’s ‘losing’ Chos?n in terms of resources. After its defeat in the war, the inevitable task in the reconstruction plan of the Japanese economy was reconsidering what resources would disappear from the prewar Japanese economy. In other words, Japan exactly matches the trend of research on the old ‘overseas territories’ that was focused on the loss of territory and what kinds of resources were ‘lost.’ It was amid such a process that the “Loss of Territory and Its Influence on Resources” was written. The concept of ‘loss’ included the expected difficulty of maintaining a closed economy based on regional units such as the wartime economy and autarkic economy, due to the postwar policy of the Allied Powers represented by an open economy and free trade. Yet fundamentally, it can be said that in this concept of ‘loss,’ the vision of decolonization needed for reestablishing the postwar relations with respective regions and countries of East Asia could not be found. Through the concept of ‘loss,’ these statistics show that only the possibility being considered was using the resources from the East Asian region under the frame of East Asian regionalism centered on Japan. Such desire is well displayed in the “Estimated Necessary Imports of Japan,” statistics that categorized resources Japan needed to import by countries and regions. Moreover, from the fact that Japan wanted imports from the East Asian region, a linking relationship can be considered with the product export strategy of Japan. In short, in order for East Asian countries to purchase Japanese products, it was a prerequisite to have purchasing power, and that power would be secured by importing food and resources from these regions in East Asia. This included the desire of maintaining the trade relationships that had been formed before the war, between Japanese products and food and resources from East Asia. In the relevant relationship, Korea was recognized as a supplier of food and mineral resources functioning under such regionalism.