The construction of military prostitution in South Korea during the U.S. military rule, 1945-1948.

SINCE SEPTEMBER 1945 when the 24th Army Corps, consisting of some 70,000 soldiers and led by General John R. Hodge, arrived to accept the transfer of power over Korea from the Japanese empire, U.S. soldiers stationed on military bases have had a significant presence in Korean society. With the formal independence of South Korea, the number of U.S. personnel was reduced to 22,823 in 1948, and the withdrawal of occupation forces began on June 30, 1949. (1) Soon, however, the Korean War turned the peninsula back into a zone of protracted military confrontation. According to a Korean nongovernmental organization (NGO), 101 military facilities, including fifty camps, entangle the Korean territory in a complex web. (2) Despite the decline in the number of bases as the political atmosphere has changed over time, the United States had at least 35,000 troops in South Korea in the early 2000s.

Small villages that depend entirely on the U.S. military economy have developed around the main U.S. bases. These "camptowns" (in Korean, gijichon (3)), with their commercial districts filled with clubs, bars, brothels, convenience stores, pawnshops, barbershops, tailor shops, photo and portrait shops, and drug stores, center on selling sex to soldiers. Gijichon prostitution is a large-scale activity; for example, in Gyeonggi Province prostitution is concentrated in four large camptowns: Dongducheon, Pyeongtaek, Paju, and Uijeongbu. More than one-tenth (11 percent) of the total population of the province is engaged in military prostitution. The number of so-called entertainment workers with health certificates, required to enter and work in the camptowns, reached around 30,000 in the 1960s and remained around 20,000 in the 1970s and 1980s, amounting to approximately one sex worker for every two to three soldiers at that time. (4)

Despite the official illegality of domestic prostitution, the Korean government tacitly condones and actively regulates prostitution around U.S. military bases. As Katharine Moon has shown, camptown prostitution has actually served the economic development of Korea, as well as its national security. The presence of U.S. troops contributed 25 percent of South Korea's GNP, playing an especially important role during the 1960s, and prostitution and related business supported over half of the U.S. camptowns' economy. (5) The Korean government has demarcated these spaces as open only to U.S. military personnel and foreign tourists; the two largest gijichon, Dongducheon and Pyeongtaek, were designated as Special Tourism Districts in 1997. (6) Women working in the entertainment industry of these areas must be registered and are subject to regular examinations for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Other Koreans commonly call these sex workers derogatory names, such as yanggalbo (Western whore) and yanggongju (Western princess). The demeaning treatment of these women as pariahs, dirty trash, and immoral or "fallen" blames them personally for their situation, differentiates them from women identified as chaste daughters and faithful wives, and ultimately helps to maintain Korean national pride. The Korean government has successfully ghettoized the gijichon as buffer zones that prevent U.S. soldiers from entering Korean society and prohibit ordinary Koreans, especially "respectable" Korean women, from interacting with U.S. men, while reaping the economic benefits that the U.S. military presence and the sex trade serving foreign soldiers provide.

The presence of prostitutes around military bases and the state regulation of sex workers who serve soldiers have been common features of European, U.S., and Asian military systems, especially in situations of imperial occupation or colonial domination. Rita Brock and Susan Thistlethwaite indicate that the sex trade in the vicinity of military bases is ubiquitous; indeed, camp followers have customarily accompanied European armies since at least the seventeenth century. (7) Britain maintained a system of regulated prostitution in its colonies, including Bombay, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, after domestic prostitution was abolished in 1886, and women serving British soldiers were required to undergo regular examinations designed to detect STDs. (8) Since World War II, the large-scale sale of women's sexual labor to U.S. soldiers has aroused public outrage in Okinawa, the Philippines, and Thailand. (9)

Feminist scholarship has analyzed not only the control of military prostitution by states, occupying armies, and colonial regimes but also the connections among militarism, sexuality, nationalism, and colonialism as interlocking forces that construct and maintain military prostitution. (10) However, the process through which U.S. camptown prostitution became entrenched in South Korea remains unexplored. Few analyses consider both the asymmetrical power relationships that have existed between Koreans and foreign occupiers and the symbiotic relationships that were constructed between the U.S. military and local governments, which must be understood within the context of Korean history, culture, and society.

Korean feminist NGOs have had significant success in bringing military prostitution into Korean public consciousness, while challenging patriarchal assumptions and shifting attention from the personal characteristics of sex workers to structural, systemic, and social problems. (11) For them, all forms of prostitution are inherently coercive and abusive and constitute violence against women, and the suggestion is that prostitution has been introduced or at least greatly fomented in Korea through colonialist or imperialist interventions by other countries. In contrast, I argue that their view of the responsibility of the United States for erecting the system is exaggerated; it not only underestimates the active roles played by local Koreans but also bypasses the historical roots of military prostitution on the peninsula. Furthermore, domestic prostitution as well as camptown prostitution has been an integral part of international tourism, which caters to the sexual desires of foreigners. Heart-wrenching descriptions focused on victimized women often eclipse more comprehensive understanding of the historical construction of military prostitution and the shifts in its form that have occurred over time.

Although the Korean system has parallels in other settings of war, colonialism, and military occupation, the processes through which Korea's system of combining criminalized and regulated prostitution was put in place sheds significant new light on the fundamental factors that shaped this system and on the shifting strategies adopted by successive military regimes. In tracing the development of Korea's system of licensed and regulated prostitution I argue that it is necessary to begin with the system erected by the Japanese military on the peninsula. U.S. Army policy took over the foundation laid by the Japanese but modified the system to achieve the dual goals of satisfying soldiers' sexual desires and controlling STDs during the period of U.S. military government rule (1945-1948). Korea's elite leaders also figure in this history. Instead of accepting the link between military camps, colonial occupation, and camptown prostitution as natural, I show that U.S. Army and public health officials interacted with Korean leaders to construct a dichotomous system, one in which prostitution was tolerated and regulated near bases but prohibited elsewhere. To reconstruct these historical developments, I utilize primary sources including the minutes of VD Control Council meetings of the U.S. military government, periodic reports of the U.S. Army Forces in Korea, and newspaper accounts unearthed through research at the U.S. National Archives II, the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Korean Library of Congress in Seoul, and McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland. In particular, the reports of "VD" committee meetings held by the U.S. military government in South Korea from the files on "venereal diseases" at the National Archives provided excellent information regarding the emergence of gijichon prostitution as well as U.S. military policies to control prostitutes in South Korea.