"}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\n with the North from 1950 to 1953. By the end of that conflict, \nsustained and vicious fighting and U.S. Air Force firebombing had left \nboth sides of the Korean Peninsula a smoldering wreck. South Korea was \nreeling from poverty, and sank into a chaotic state of political and \nsocial inertia as it adapted to its postwar status as a U.S. client \nstate. In total, the war claimed more than four million Korean \nfatalities, more than half of which were civilians, which translated \ninto millions of widows and orphans; meanwhile, partition with the North\n created a bleak legacy\n of divided families throughout the country. I lived in Seoul from 1959 \nto 1961 and vividly remember from my parents\u2019 tenure there as Christian \nrelief workers the shocking conditions of a country ripped apart by war.
It\n was amid these postwar conditions of acute displacement and destruction\n that the military camp towns sprouted up. The \u201coverwhelming majority\u201d \nof prostitutes in the camp towns were either orphans or abandoned \nchildren, Wellesley Professor Katharine H.S. Moon wrote in Sex Among Allies,\n her groundbreaking history of military prostitution in South Korea. The\n sex workers in the camp towns typically experienced a combination of \n\u201cpoverty, low-class status, physical, sexual and emotional abuse even \nbefore entering the kichijong world.\u201d Once inside, \u201cthey were no longer \ntreated as a person but as merchandise,\u201d 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\n zones were established around 31 U.S. Army, Air Force, and Navy bases \nin South Korea. In Gyonggi province, which extends from south of Seoul \nup to the DMZ and was home to the majority of U.S. bases, some 10,000 \nsex workers were registered every year from 1953 to the late 1980s. They\n were part of a major industry: Moon estimates in her book that at the \npeak of U.S. troop strength in the 1980s, the kichijong economy\n contributed 5 percent of South Korea\u2019s gross domestic product. In \nDongducheon in the early 1970s, \u201c1 percent of the GDP was made here,\u201d \nsaid Choi. \u201cIt was overflowing with money. But it was short-term profit \nfor Seoul investors, so the money flowed out of town.\u201d
Like\n Choi, many of the Koreans who seek justice for camp-town sex workers \nrefer to them as \u201ccomfort women\u201d\u2014an especially charged designation. That\n term traditionally refers to Korean women whom the Japanese Imperial \nArmy kidnapped and forced to work in military brothels called \u201ccomfort \nstations\u201d during World War II. In Korea, North and South, the survivors of that system\n are living symbols of the country\u2019s 35 years of subjugation to Japanese\n colonialism. And, due to Japan\u2019s conservative ruling party\u2019s refusal to\n fully admit its military\u2019s role in enslaving the comfort women and \nimporting forced laborers from Korea, the topic remains a source of deep\n tension between South Korea and Japan that recently escalated into a full-fledged trade war and\n Seoul\u2019s cancellation of an intelligence-sharing pact with Tokyo. \n(Japan\u2019s war crimes have also become a political issue in the United \nStates, where, much to the chagrin of the Japanese government, memorials to Japan\u2019s 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\n women as victims of a heartless imperial power, in the manner of the \ncomfort women. Instead, many Koreans see the camp-town prostitutes as \n\u201cfallen women bringing shame to the nation,\u201d said Park Jeong-mi, a \nprofessor at Chungbuk National University who was an expert witness in \nthe 2014 lawsuit against the South Korean government. But Park argues \nthat this sentiment is misleading and unfair, and in her research she \nhas found a direct historical link between the Japanese and American \nsystems that supplied Korean women to their troops. This key connection \nclearly undermines the long-standing Korean perception of U.S.-brokered \nmilitary prostitution as a system of more-or-less voluntary labor, \nprompting moral disapproval and public shaming within the traditional \nKorean patriarchy.
During the years of direct U.S. occupation\n from 1945 to 1948, the U.S. military government created an \nadministrative state that was dominated by Koreans who had collaborated \nwith Japan\u2019s colonial rulers. The leaders of this first occupying regime\n outlawed prostitution, but got around the prohibition by building \nbrothels for U.S. troops. These outposts were dubbed \u201ccomfort stations\u201d \nafter the Japanese wartime model, according to documents Park recently \nunearthed from South Korea\u2019s Ministry of Health. The shift from \nJapanese- to American-coerced sex work was an easy transition, she said:\n \u201cHigh-ranking Korean officials who served under Japanese colonial rule \nwere familiar with the comfort station system.\u201d
Park also found \nU.S. documents showing that, after the Korean War, American commanders \nrejected the idea of the Korean state running brothels as the Japanese \nmilitary had done. Instead, they did what future generations of the military would practice\n in Iraq and Afghanistan: They privatized military functions\u2014in this \ncase, the provision of sex workers to American troops. Under U.S. \npressure, Park said, the Republic of Korea (ROK) government licensed the\n bars and clubs that, in turn, hired the women who entertained the U.S. \ntroops. She likens those establishments to \u201cde facto brothels.\u201d
But\n much as had been the case with the Japanese comfort stations, the \nKorean brothel owners permitted vanishingly little agency for their \nsex-work recruits. If the comfort women for Japan were kidnap victims,\n the U.S. camp-town women were victims of sustained economic \ncoercion\u2014much like indentured servants or tenant farmers. Once they were\n recruited to the camp towns, women found themselves trapped. They \ncarried out their sex work in rooms they had to rent from the bar \nowners. They also had to buy all their supplies, including their bed, \ntheir clothes, and the phonographs they set up to entertain their \nAmerican clients. \u201cFrom the get-go, you have a pile of debt,\u201d Choi said.\n \u201cYou try to pay your way out, but it\u2019s a never-ending story.\u201d
The distinction between the American kichijong\n and the Japanese comfort-women regimes became still blurrier at the \nday-to-day operational level, according to the testimony now assembled \nfrom former kichijong workers. Sun, my Korean military \ntranslator, stressed this same continuity in our talks. Sun, who \nsometimes patrolled downtown Dongducheon while working as a KATUSA, \nhomed in on the coercive traits that both sex-work regimes share in \ncommon. \u201cMost women who were there at the camp town, really it wasn\u2019t \ntheir will,\u201d he explained. \u201cMany were orphans and unfortunate in their \neconomic situation, and many were stopped from leaving when they were \nthrown into the Monkey House. They were forced to be there.\u2026 It was \nclearly a government-regulated and -sponsored sex trade to appease the \nAmericans\u2019 sexual need. So the methods were quite similar.\u201d
\nThis is increasingly evident as more details of the camp-town economy\u2019s history become public. As the kichijong\n system took off in the 1950s, the U.S. and ROK governments set up an \nelaborate policing system to supervise the conduct and health of sex \nworkers. By 1957, according to documents Park found in the U.S. National\n Archives, U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) was holding periodic conferences \nwith the Korean government and the Korean National Police to manage the \ncamp-town centers. American military officials also joined forces with \nKorean police to patrol the camp towns for unlicensed and untested \nprostitutes; the first isolation stations for camp-town women suspected \nof spreading STDs were built in 1964. The rigid supervision of sex \nworkers\u2019 conduct and the U.S.-instigated cleanup campaigns became \nespecially 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.