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Fighting for the Enemy: Koreans in Japan's War, 1937-1945, by Brandon Palmer. Korean Studies of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. 272 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $75.00 (cloth), $30.00 (paper).
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...