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Over There

Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present

Duke University Press

REGULATING DESIRE, MANAGING THE EMPIRE U.S. Military Prostitution in South Korea, 1945–1970

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SEUNGSOOK MOON

I am a comfort woman catering to foreign soldiers in the 7UP club in Yonp'ungni, Chunae Township, P'aju County, Kyonggi Province. Three years have passed since I came to [YongjugoΓJ. I've already been working as a comfort woman for over two years. I must get out of the bridle of this life.... I've been treated only with contempt because I am a comfort woman serving foreign soldiers, a woman with an inhumane job, but my writing can be of help to other people. Yet I'm not writing my repentance. Although my life may have been inhumane and vicious, I have never committed a crime or a sin. (Pak 1965, 6, 10; my translation)

Annie Pak (or Pak Ok-sun in Korean), whose words are quoted from her autobiography, was conceived by a Korean woman and a white American soldier in January 1946. Her mother was a seventeen-year-old maiden employed in a men's suit factory in Seoul to alter American soldiers' uniforms, and her father was a young private who occasionally visited the factory. Her mother frequently worked until very late at night. On a very gusty winter night, when she came out of the factory to go home, an American military truck stopped in front of her. The soldier, whose face she knew, kindly offered her a ride home, and she thankfully got on the truck. But he took her to a remote place and raped her. Because he was in love with her mother, Annie was told, he took her into his unit and lived with her for five days until she was found by his commanding officer and kicked out. She did not even know the soldier's name. Annie's mother revealed this secret of Annie's birth only after Annie herself had become a camptown sex worker in the mid-1960s (Pak 1965, 253-54).

Left with a Eurasian daughter, Annie's mother began to work in military prostitution to raise her. Clever about multiplying her meager savings, her mother was able to buy a house and leave the work behind. Unfortunately, she then lost her money and houses to charlatans (all Korean men) who lived off her with the promise of marriage, which would have been a ticket to the respectable life for a woman. These vagaries of life evaporated her mother's plan to give Annie a secondary education. After struggling to make ends meet for a few years, her mother finally returned to Yongjugol, a thriving camptown, in the 1960s, where Annie started working in a convenience store patronized by American soldiers. Annie's unusual Euro-American appearance attracted many American soldiers to the store, and at seventeen she fell in love with one of them—a white officer. They lived together like a newlywed couple for several months, and she became pregnant. Yet it turned out that the officer did not intend to marry her, as she had expected, and like numerous soldiers before and after him he left when his service in Korea ended. It is not clear whether Annie was able to leave the camptown for good and whether she is still alive. If she is, she would be living somewhere in Korea as a woman in her sixties.

This chapter traces the emergence and consolidation of U.S. military prostitution during the time span when these two generations of women came to sell sex for a living under conditions beyond their own choice and control. These conditions included the presence of imperial troops, the legacy of the comfort station that naturalized both military and civilian authorities' use of women's sexual labor to manage (male) soldiers, and the mass impoverishment generated by Japanese colonial exploitation and the Korean War. The confluence of these conditions generated the institution of camptown prostitution, which became a naturalized fixture of the American military presence in South Korea. The racialized cultural differences between Korea and the U.S. further amplified the making and spread of the institution. The estimated total of 180,000 camptown sex workers in the 1950s and roughly 10,000 camptown sex workers in the Tongduch'on area alone in the mid-1960s were staggering in light of the annual number of American troops in South Korea, which fluctuated from 85,000 to 50,000 between 1955 and 1970 (Oh et al. 1990,56). In West Germany by comparison (also a country divided by Cold War politics that steadily hosted more than a quarter-million American troops in the 1950s and 1960s), prostitution catering to American soldiers operated on a much smaller scale.

The history of the U.S. military presence in Korea began in September 1945, when the Twenty-Fourth Army Corps, consisting of some 72,000 soldiers and led by Lieutenant-General John R. Hodge, commanding general of the U.S. Armed Forces in Korea (USAFIK), arrived to transfer power from the crumbled Japanese colonial empire. As the agent of the American empire that commanded the global network of military bases, the military developed the unofficial but consistent system of regulated prostitution during its direct rule of Korea (1945-48). The U.S. Army Military Government (USAMG) suppressed unregulated prostitution to control the spread of venereal disease (VD) and, at the same time, regulated prostitution as an expedient means of entertaining and controlling male soldiers. The succeeding Korean government of President Syngman Rhee (1948-60) maintained a similarly contradictory position on prostitution that both criminalized it in law and supported it for American (and Korean) soldiers in practice. During the Korean War, the Korean government adopted the Japanese institution of "comfort stations" to serve Allied Forces and Korean soldiers in the name of protecting respectable women and rewarding soldiers for their sacrifice. During the 1950s, when the Korean War resulted in a semi-permanent U.S. military presence, the development of camptowns sped up to meet sex and other entertainment needs of the American soldiers, and regulated prostitution became an integral component of the camptown economy. During the 1960s, while continuing to criminalize prostitution in formal law, the military government of President Park Chung Hee further consolidated camptown prostitution through the creation of 104 "special districts" and the establishment of rules to support the camptown economy. This chapter contends that an unofficial yet consistent policy regarding prostitution existed despite the criminalization of prostitution in both countries from 1945 to 1970 (and even after). As Cynthia Enloe (1989) points out, political powers rely on certain notions of femininity and masculinity for their smooth working. Regulated military prostitution assumes soldiers as heterosexual men in need of constant sexual gratification and requires such construction of militarized masculinity. The emergence and consolidation of regulated military prostitution in Korea reveals that prostitution is an essential component of expanding and maintaining the American empire, as were the cases with European colonial empires, and it is sustained through the collaboration of local elites, at the expense of lower-class women, to serve their political and economic interests.

Use of Women's Sexual Labor for Foreign Soldiers in the Colonizing and Decolonizing Processes

The intimate liaison between regulated prostitution and a foreign military in the Korean Peninsula preceded USAMG rule. Military prostitution catering to Japanese soldiers stationed in Korea began after Korea's "opening" by Japan in 1876, leading to the growing influx of Japanese merchants, soldiers, and laborers. In 1883, Japanese businesses opened concentrated brothels for Japanese soldiers in downtown Seoul. Their conspicuous existence incited a strong reaction from the local population. The Japanese authorities, however, condoned them and in 1904 finally began permitting public prostitution (kongch'ang) in Seoul (Son 1988, 286; Song 1989, 71). This legalization facilitated the spread of public prostitution districts in the midst of Japan's growing power over Korea, especially after its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. After Korea was colonized in 1910, the colonial state legalized the trafficking of women for prostitution under the Regulations Concerning the Acquisition of Prostitutes of 1916 (Kim 989, 1371; Yun 1987, 2526). Under this system of public prostitution, the colonial state recognized prostitution as a legitimate form of business and collected taxes on it (Pak 1994, 65-68). The colonial authorities implemented their own VD control programs, including the periodic examination of licensed prostitutes (Yi 1997, 72.).

During the Japanese military expansion between 1930 and 1945, the Japanese colonial state actively consumed women's bodies in order to sexually feed and manage its imperial armies. Initially private businesses recruited Japanese women from poor rural areas for "military comfort stations" in China and other conquered areas where large numbers of Japanese soldiers stayed. These women were called karayuki son, or "foreign-bound women." The sex workers were exploited in the name of "the last service for the nation" (Chai 1993; Chong 1997). After the Sino-Japanese War (1937), however, the Japanese military began to implement a policy to manage the comfort stations directly in order to check the rampant spread of venereal disease and drafted a large number of Korean women (Chong 1997, 105). Encountering the unwelcome partner of the colonial expansion, the military turned its attention to seventeen- to twenty-year-old Korean women as substitutes for Japanese sex workers. Aware that women in Korea's Confucian society were instilled with an education that valued rigid chastity, the military replaced Japanese sex workers with young Korean women who were chaste enough to be free of venereal disease and young enough to endure disease if it developed. "Military comfort women" were an integral part of Japan's military expansion, which spanned Korea, China, Southeast Asia, and Papua New Guinea. The women were sent to battlefields as "royal gifts" from the Japanese emperor (Kim 997, 53).

The demise of colonial rule did not end the use of women's sexual labor for foreign soldiers in Korea. Projecting its image as a "benevolent liberator" to teach democracy to Koreans, the U.S. military was deeply implicated in various forms of prostitution from the dawn of its occupation of Korea. Upon arriving in Korea, the U.S. military used dance halls that the Office of the (Japanese) Governor-General had opened to protect repatriating Japanese women from American soldiers (Yi 2004b, 272). The military also instituted separate clubs for officers and enlisted men because such a "service club program" provided "wholesome recreation for the troops" and proved to be valuable to the "improvement of morale of military personnel." Hostesses in these clubs were locally procured. The so-called decolonizing process led by the U.S. military continued to provide fertile soil for the rapid growth of private and unregulated prostitution (sach'ang) in Seoul, Ascom, Taejon, Kwangju, and Pusan. The boundary between hostesses and sex workers became blurred in impoverished Korea, where well-paid American soldiers aggressively sought out local women for sexual services.

American GIS chased after Korean women in the context of racialized cultural difference, coupled with racism against the Koreans by GIS who were living and working in the racially segregated U.S. military. Military authorities had to deal with the pervasive problems of the deterioration of military courtesy, discipline, appearance, and training. Under the category of courtesy, the authorities addressed widespread racism against the Koreans, ranging from the use of the racial slur "gooks," physical assaults, reckless driving, and undue arrests of Koreans to making aggressive passes at Korean women. The courtesy drive launched by the Office of Commanding General Hodge in November 1946 summarized American racism in a surprisingly frank manner: "Americans are ignorant of Korean customs, show no appreciation of Korean art or culture, and openly ridicule the idea that there can be any good in anything Korean.... Americans act as though Koreans were a conquered nation rather than a liberated people."

As the agents of the expanding American empire, "[GIS] in Korea think and act as though the world was made solely for them and their pleasure." Within this imperialist mindset, GIS viewed sexual access to Korean women outside the respectability of marriage as their entitlement, as agents of European colonialism did toward colonized women of color. Seriously concerned about American racism as "one of the principle factors adverse to [the] Korean-American relationship," the military authorities instructed GIS to learn about and respect Korean customs. In a long, "restricted" message concerning how to change their bad behavior, Commanding General Hodge exhorted GIS to "keep [their] hands off Korean women." Using a circular, the authorities attempted to teach GIS about the "vast cultural difference and social customs between Americans and Koreans" and urged them to "refrain from association with Korean women in public, except where such association is obviously of an impersonal or official nature." At the same time, the circular, to be read to "all male military and civilian personnel assigned or attached to the USAFIK," suggested that sexual relations with prostitutes be culturally acceptable but that all other forms of sexual relations with Korean women "[were] deemed by Koreans to be classed as an act[s] of rape." The annual report of Medical Department activities for 1947 affirmed the condoning of prostitution on the grounds of cultural difference in its conclusion that, coupled with a dearth of adequate recreational facilities, Korean custom that segregated sexes in public tended to circumscribe encounters between GIS and Korean women to "brothels, dance halls, and street walkers." Such tacit acceptance of GIS' sexual entitlement led to numerous liaisons between GIS and Korean women. Even married officers unaccompanied by their wives took "steady female partners," which resembled the practice of various forms of concubinage in European colonies.

Amid the rampant spread of private prostitution, the USAMG pursued duplicitous measures of condemning prostitution in law and inspecting sex workers and other categories of women who sexually served GIS. The USAMG issued the legal "prohibition of the trafficking in women or their sales contracts (punyojaui maemae ttonun ku maemaegyeyagui kumji)" in 1946. This law, however, did not prohibit prostitution that was presumably based on an agreement between a woman and her employer (Pak 1994, 85). Concerned about its image as a liberating force, the USAMG finally replaced the 1946 law with Public Act (PA) 7 of 1947. Proclaimed on November 14, 1947, and effective from February 1948 onward, PA 7 abolished the institution of public (or licensed) prostitution established by the Japanese colonial state. The professed objectives of the law were to eliminate the "evil customs" of Japanese rule and to promote the democratic principle of "equality between men and women" (Pobjech'o 1952, 179). Beneath the glib façade of emancipatory rhetoric lay convoluted political concerns. For the USAMG, prostitution was the object of effective regulation rather than of elimination. Alarmed by widespread VD and other communicable diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria, and leprosy, among the Koreans, the military authorities immediately established medical facilities and a public-health infrastructure (Smith 1950, 9-12). Concluding that prostitution was a threat to American soldiers, the authorities initially placed "geisha houses" and "houses of prostitution" off-limits to American troops. Yet the authorities did not attempt to criminalize prostitution, and it was argued that "a Korean prostitute was not disobeying the law unless she engaged in sexual intercourse with any member of the occupying forces while suffering from a VD in an infectious stage" (Meade 1951, 220-21). Following this logic, a medical officer "secured permission from [Sixth] Division Headquarters to keep the houses of prostitution on limits provid[ed] there would be weekly inspection of the working personnel" (Meade 1951, 220-21).

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Excerpted from Over There by Maria Höhn, Seungsook Moon. Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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