“The Empire Is the Enemy of the East”: Student Activism in 1940s Colonial Korea

In May 1943, colonial police in Korea began an intensive four-month investigation into an underground Korean student activist network that had increasingly resisted the mobilization for “total war.” More than three hundred students throughout the Korean peninsula, Manchuria, and beyond were arrested, four of whom died from torture while in police custody. The majority of the ten students ultimately convicted to lengthy prison terms were still incarcerated when Japanese colonization ended in 1945. In this article, I use this case as a means of examining the impact of World War II on Korean student activism. By analyzing confiscated protest manifestoes, police interrogation logs, and court records in conjunction with larger wartime shifts in colonial policy, I demonstrate that student activists were able to appropriate and subvert the very claims that colonial officials publicly asserted in this period—for example, the assertion that Korean students were vital to the Japanese Empire and represented an insufficiently tapped source of martial strength—in order to advocate for Korean independence from Japanese colonial rule.