Insurance and Colonial Governmentality in Korea under Japanese Rule

In 1929, the Post Office in Korea, a colony of Japan, created a new life insurance system, called kan’i hoken (basic insurance). This system took great influence from the kan’i hoken system that had been created in the mainland in 1916. In these systems, advocates and officials believed that insurance could solve the problems of social disorder that had accompanied both industrialization and colonization. Proponents of the new system contended that life insurance would stabilize the lives of laborers and transform them into thrifty, responsible consuming subjects focused on maintaining familial continuity. Through insurance, state bureaucrats and social reformers utilized family, guided by the patriarch as a wage-earning subject, as a site for the instantiation of habits of responsible conduct into the fabric of everyday life. As part of this project, bureaucrats worked to convince Koreans to give up local mutual assistance associations (kei) and to become modern consumer-subjects of insurance. This took mutual aid away from the local and the immediate and expanded it into a more abstract system functioning at the level of colonial space. Moreover, the profits gleaned from this insurance system also became an important source of funds for social welfare projects in colonial Korea. The colonial state tried to position itself as the force that would allow for individual subjects to come together in mutual benefit to establish new types of collective life. In Japan occupied Korea, then, colonial governmentality became a means to simultaneously extract resources from the populace and improve the productive capacity of the territory. This paper will thus interrogate how the colonial state, through the post office’ life insurance system, used discourses of family security, responsibility, and social welfare to stabilize and remold the population in colonial Korea.