자본, 기술, 생명 －흥남-미나마타[水俣] 또는 기업도시의 해방 전후－

Abstract

In this article, observing a unique site of the ‘company town’ Heungnam, I attempted to analyze some aspects that technological practices reorganized the life on multiple levels, and to contemplate a phase of ‘form of life’ in the colonial/imperial regime from the level of factory, city and labour. I also tried to consider how this ‘form of life’ was rearranged and continued in Korea and Japan after World War Ⅱ, by crossing border of temporal-spatial conditions. The Nippon Nitrogen Fertilizer Co. Ltd., one of the Japanese emerging zaibatsu, didn’t only construct a mammoth heavy chemicals Kombinat in the Heungnam region, but also made up Heungnam town itself. Heungnam the ‘company town’ was created and controlled by the Capital-State Kombinat, which was one body overlapped by capital and state. Examining its operation mode, we can cognize a ‘form of life’ in the colonial/imperial regime. As Lee Buk-myeong depicted in his fictions, lives in Heungnam has been determined by the factory=fortress. The factory=fortress was retained by managing the product site in a sanitary way, and by banishing the hindrance factor out of the factory. After the Liberation, this factory=fortress was commanded by the purpose of the socialist nation-building, then North Korea as a whole turned into the factory=fortress. And the death was erased from the nation-building narrative of emancipated nation, while it came up from Minamata factory in postwar Japan. This article is a part of the broader project that will examine the exploitation apparatuses and its legacies of the colonial/imperial regime by cross-bordering Korea and Japan.