This study explores colonial Korea and its relation to imperial Japan through the lens of Korean emigrants to Japan who acted as a bridge between the periphery and metropole of the Japanese empire. Because Korean residents in the labouring class occupied the largest population of foreigners in imperial Japan since the latter years of World War I, much attention has been given to Korean labourers in existing scholarship. While rethinking the migration of Korean labourers to the metropole through the prism of immigration regulations issued by the Japanese authorities, this research also casts a spotlight on groups of Korean emigrants who either appear most or least frequently in dominant narratives: overseas students, Christian adherents, and women who were not mobilized to serve the Japanese Imperial Army. Through the examination of government documents, newspapers, journal articles, and memoirs, it probes the multifarious motives behind the migration of each group and the empire’s regulation of their activities and mobility within the empire. My project aims to unravel the dynamic mobility of Korean emigrants by depolarizing the memories of Korean migration that are not confined to a singular experience of colonial migration. Korean migration, in turn, will reveal the ability and the limitation of the Japanese empire in regulating and accommodating the mobility of Korean emigrants, while simultaneously working to integrate them into the tentacles of the empire.