antoine-roquentin:

Like much else in modern Korea, the conditions that spawned the sex-work alliance with the U.S. military date back to the trauma of the war with the North from 1950 to 1953. By the end of that conflict, sustained and vicious fighting and U.S. Air Force firebombing had left both sides of the Korean Peninsula a smoldering wreck. South Korea was reeling from poverty, and sank into a chaotic state of political and social inertia as it adapted to its postwar status as a U.S. client state. In total, the war claimed more than four million Korean fatalities, more than half of which were civilians, which translated into millions of widows and orphans; meanwhile, partition with the North created a bleak legacy of divided families throughout the country. I lived in Seoul from 1959 to 1961 and vividly remember from my parents’ tenure there as Christian relief workers the shocking conditions of a country ripped apart by war.

It was amid these postwar conditions of acute displacement and destruction that the military camp towns sprouted up. The “overwhelming majority” of prostitutes in the camp towns were either orphans or abandoned children, Wellesley Professor Katharine H.S. Moon wrote in Sex Among Allies, her groundbreaking history of military prostitution in South Korea. The sex workers in the camp towns typically experienced a combination of “poverty, low-class status, physical, sexual and emotional abuse even before entering the kichijong world.” Once inside, “they were no longer treated as a person but as merchandise,” Kim Tae-jung, a counselor at Durebang, the support group for sex workers, explained at the forum in New York.

Eventually, the camp-town industry bulked up into a nationwide franchise operation. Kichijong zones were established around 31 U.S. Army, Air Force, and Navy bases in South Korea. In Gyonggi province, which extends from south of Seoul up to the DMZ and was home to the majority of U.S. bases, some 10,000 sex workers were registered every year from 1953 to the late 1980s. They were part of a major industry: Moon estimates in her book that at the peak of U.S. troop strength in the 1980s, the kichijong economy contributed 5 percent of South Korea’s gross domestic product. In Dongducheon in the early 1970s, “1 percent of the GDP was made here,” said Choi. “It was overflowing with money. But it was short-term profit for Seoul investors, so the money flowed out of town.”

Like Choi, many of the Koreans who seek justice for camp-town sex workers refer to them as “comfort women”—an especially charged designation. That term traditionally refers to Korean women whom the Japanese Imperial Army kidnapped and forced to work in military brothels called “comfort stations” during World War II. In Korea, North and South, the survivors of that system are living symbols of the country’s 35 years of subjugation to Japanese colonialism. And, due to Japan’s conservative ruling party’s refusal to fully admit its military’s role in enslaving the comfort women and importing forced laborers from Korea, the topic remains a source of deep tension between South Korea and Japan that recently escalated into a full-fledged trade war and Seoul’s cancellation of an intelligence-sharing pact with Tokyo. (Japan’s war crimes have also become a political issue in the United States, where, much to the chagrin of the Japanese government, memorials to Japan’s comfort women have been built in 10 cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.)

By and large, however, the Korean public has refrained from treating the kichijong women as victims of a heartless imperial power, in the manner of the comfort women. Instead, many Koreans see the camp-town prostitutes as “fallen women bringing shame to the nation,” said Park Jeong-mi, a professor at Chungbuk National University who was an expert witness in the 2014 lawsuit against the South Korean government. But Park argues that this sentiment is misleading and unfair, and in her research she has found a direct historical link between the Japanese and American systems that supplied Korean women to their troops. This key connection clearly undermines the long-standing Korean perception of U.S.-brokered military prostitution as a system of more-or-less voluntary labor, prompting moral disapproval and public shaming within the traditional Korean patriarchy.

During the years of direct U.S. occupation from 1945 to 1948, the U.S. military government created an administrative state that was dominated by Koreans who had collaborated with Japan’s colonial rulers. The leaders of this first occupying regime outlawed prostitution, but got around the prohibition by building brothels for U.S. troops. These outposts were dubbed “comfort stations” after the Japanese wartime model, according to documents Park recently unearthed from South Korea’s Ministry of Health. The shift from Japanese- to American-coerced sex work was an easy transition, she said: “High-ranking Korean officials who served under Japanese colonial rule were familiar with the comfort station system.”

Park also found U.S. documents showing that, after the Korean War, American commanders rejected the idea of the Korean state running brothels as the Japanese military had done. Instead, they did what future generations of the military would practice in Iraq and Afghanistan: They privatized military functions—in this case, the provision of sex workers to American troops. Under U.S. pressure, Park said, the Republic of Korea (ROK) government licensed the bars and clubs that, in turn, hired the women who entertained the U.S. troops. She likens those establishments to “de facto brothels.”

But much as had been the case with the Japanese comfort stations, the Korean brothel owners permitted vanishingly little agency for their sex-work recruits. If the comfort women for Japan were kidnap victims, the U.S. camp-town women were victims of sustained economic coercion—much like indentured servants or tenant farmers. Once they were recruited to the camp towns, women found themselves trapped. They carried out their sex work in rooms they had to rent from the bar owners. They also had to buy all their supplies, including their bed, their clothes, and the phonographs they set up to entertain their American clients. “From the get-go, you have a pile of debt,” Choi said. “You try to pay your way out, but it’s a never-ending story.”

The distinction between the American kichijong and the Japanese comfort-women regimes became still blurrier at the day-to-day operational level, according to the testimony now assembled from former kichijong workers. Sun, my Korean military translator, stressed this same continuity in our talks. Sun, who sometimes patrolled downtown Dongducheon while working as a KATUSA, homed in on the coercive traits that both sex-work regimes share in common. “Most women who were there at the camp town, really it wasn’t their will,” he explained. “Many were orphans and unfortunate in their economic situation, and many were stopped from leaving when they were thrown into the Monkey House. They were forced to be there.… It was clearly a government-regulated and -sponsored sex trade to appease the Americans’ sexual need. So the methods were quite similar.”

This is increasingly evident as more details of the camp-town economy’s history become public. As the kichijong system took off in the 1950s, the U.S. and ROK governments set up an elaborate policing system to supervise the conduct and health of sex workers. By 1957, according to documents Park found in the U.S. National Archives, U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) was holding periodic conferences with the Korean government and the Korean National Police to manage the camp-town centers. American military officials also joined forces with Korean police to patrol the camp towns for unlicensed and untested prostitutes; the first isolation stations for camp-town women suspected of spreading STDs were built in 1964. The rigid supervision of sex workers’ conduct and the U.S.-instigated cleanup campaigns became especially constricting in the early 1970s, under the rule of Park Chung-hee, the former general who ran South Korea as a dictatorship for 18 years.