Fighting for the Enemy: Koreans in Japan’s War, 1937–1945 by Brandon Palmer (review)

In Fighting for the Enemy: Koreans in Japan’s War, 1937–1945, Brandon Palmer hopes to align Western scholarship of colonial Korea with more objective revisionist movements in both South Korean and Japanese academia. Fighting for the Enemy provides a unique look at a less-discussed area of colonial Korean history for English-language readers, supplementing a range of works on topics such as comfort women and Japanese assimilation efforts on the peninsula. Palmer’s focus is on how young Korean men were mobilized in, and contributed to, Japan’s war effort in the Second World War, either as soldiers, sailors, or laborers. Individual Koreans, according to Palmer, were “not solely victims of the colonial state,” but rather were active historical agents who volunteered to fight, engaged in nonviolent acts of resistance, and tried to work within the colonial system to better themselves, their families, and their country.

Fighting for the Enemy begins by placing the Korean colonial experience within the greater context of global colonialism. As a running theme throughout the text, Palmer makes comparisons with various Western colonial regimes. He does this not to make light of Japanese colonial brutality, but rather to show that Japan was working within an existing colonial model. In one such instance, Palmer compares the colonial Korean education system to the United States’ policy of forced education for Native American children during the same period, concluding that “such colonial examples help us understand the global historical processes in which Japan participated; they do not deny or lessen the suffering and exploitation of the Korean people.”

Palmer continues by examining the mobilization of soldiers and sailors in Korea. He starts by focusing on the Korean Volunteer Soldier Systems, which lasted from 1938 to 1943. Despite this period’s being characterized by the war with China stagnating and the outbreak of a wider war with Western powers, Japan engaged in a piecemeal approach to selecting Korean soldiers and sailors who volunteered to fight. Palmer argues that Japan was unwilling to make colonial troops a deciding factor in the military outcome of the war because so few Korean soldiers were selected for service in this period despite the relatively large amount of manpower and resources expended to screen and train applicants. Rather, accepting volunteers was another step in Japan’s attempts at instilling martial, Japanese values in Korean men and facilitating propaganda in of issues, such as receiving veteran’s benefits and back pay adjusted for inflation.

Palmer then discusses military laborers who were hired to replace the depleted industrial sector in Japan, as well as to work in auxiliary military roles, such as construction workers. Palmer points out that Japan’s prewar colonial policies and poor administrative practices greatly hindered the mobilization of Korean laborers and soldiers. Many Koreans used the resulting administrative problems, such as exploiting incomplete family records, where even the gender of those listed could easily be called into question, as a way to avoid draft and recruitment drives. As the war worsened and labor quotas failed to be filled by volunteers, colonial authorities increasingly engaged in coercion and trickery to acquire Korean laborers to work in Japanese industry. Palmer admits that Korean resistance, ranging from evading drafts to doing intentionally poor work, did not play a significant factor in Japan’s loss of the war. Nonetheless, he applauds the Korean people’s ability to “challenge the hegemony of the Japanese system” through a multitude of individual acts of nonviolent resistance.

Fighting for the Enemy places itself in firm opposition to the South Korean nationalist historical paradigm, also known as internal development theory. Palmer contends that while it is a politically convenient narrative, it does a disservice to the Koreans who lived through the war. Its primary flaw is that it implies that only collaborators had any...