Brokers of Empire: Japanese settler colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945

In 1904, when the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack on the Russian Pacific Fleet at Port Arthur to settle their contest over Korea and Manchuria, a stream of Japanese merchants and camp followers crossed the Korea Strait. Amid the wave of migrants was Kobayashi Genroku (1867-1940), a scion of a merchant family from the southeastern shore of Lake Biwa. Hauling a cargo of merchandise and accompanied by some twenty clerks and factory hands, Kobayashi boarded a ship for Pusan to "seize this golden opportunity" to expand his family's business, Chojiya, which he had recently inherited at the age of 24. On the eve of the Meiji Restoration, Chojiya had switched its product line from samurai armor to Western clothes, which the young emperor would shortly declare the new "national dress." And just as imperial Japan shed the "flimsy" garb of the Orient, Chojiya provided officers and bureaucrats stationed on the peninsula with Western caps and uniforms-a trade that Kobayashi would pursue for the rest of his life with the singular resolve to "bury his bones" in the Korean soil that fell under Japanese control in 1905.1.