The history of kisaeng (traditional courtesans) or kinyo as they were originally called, goes back several centuries to the Koryo Dynasty (918—1392). Kisaeng were the favoured court entertainers during the long Chosfin Dynasty (1392—1910) and their accomplishments and erudition made them the natural companions of aristocratic men at leisure. Their low status as members of the despised ch’oonmin caste meant that they could make no claims upon their lovers, and the kisaeng repertoire of songs and poetry is strewn with references to hopeless and undying love. Those clients who married a favoured kisaeng took them as secondary wives or concubines, and during the Chosbn Dynasty any male offspring of these relationships were restricted to less exalted professions and prevented from sitting the state examinations which gave access to prestigious careers in the bureaucracy. The potential threat that kisaeng posed to the aristocratic family was thus contained by the concubinage system which protected primary wives and their offspring from inheritance disputes while allowing the patriarch to pursue a relationship with another woman whom he was then obliged to financially support. This system in the abstract displays the ideal equilibrium between male pleasure and ethical social relations which distributed rewards and reinforced the stability of the social and gender hierarchies of the Confucian status system. All this would be altered by the new ‘industrialisation of prostitution’ ushered in by colonial capitalist development.
The genealogy of the various terms used to describe sex work is related to Korea’s history as a colony of Japan in the early part of the twentieth century (1910—45). The development of the market for sex, however, predated colonialism. In the nineteenth century northeast Asia became engulfed in imperialist wars for expansion and independence. The Sino-Japanese War (1894—95) was fought on Korean soil, and the Russo-Japanese War (1904—5) followed by the annexation of Korea by Japan later that year was accompanied by a boom in the sex trade providing sexual services to the military (on militarised sexualities see also Mackie and Tanji in this volume). War and imperialism not only expanded the market for sex, these processes also gave Korea its particular niche in the Japanese Empire as Korean kisaeng or traditional courtesans found favour with the epicurean tastes of the colonisers. In 1902 Korea’s first red-light district was established in the bustling port city of Pusan. Thereafter red-light districts became an integral part of the foreign concessions; and in 1908 the Japanese police enacted the Kisaeng Regulation Order that ordered all kisaeng to register with the colonial police. Even before full colonisation in 1910, the protectorate state moved quickly to control the sex labour of its subjects. Kisaeng thus moved from under the patronage of the old dynasty to the management of the new.
The kisaeng profession was itself layered and segregated by class. In the Choshn Dynasty the discrepancy between kisaeng who plied their trade in country taverns and provincial kisaeng houses and those trained from childhood to work in the court was immense. The latter were grade one kisaeng — the highest rank; grade two were hereditary kisaeng who had retired and saw their own private clients; and grade three kisaeng were the more poorly remunerated who worked as entertainers and prostitutes in large and small kisaeng chip (kisaeng salons) scattered across the peninsula (Pak 2001: 79). Far from destabilising these hierarchies, the modernisation of the kisaeng profession under Japanese colonial rule increased the opportunity for enrichment at one end of the profession and poverty and ruin at the other.
Imperialism greatly expanded the market for Korea’s kisaeng and over the 1920s and 1930s postcards, tourist brochures and posters circulated around the Japanese Empire advertising kisaeng as an inducement to holiday in the colony (Korean National Folklore Museum, 2009). At the same time that kisaeng developed their niche as the beautiful embodiment of what was seen as a charmingly backward civilisation, they encountered fierce competition as the sex market in Korea modernised. Sexualised service work proliferated with industrialisation and large numbers of people pouring into the cities looking for work; and new occupations emerged for young, impoverished women. Along with factories, mills, department stores, schools, hospitals, and domestic service, young women found employment in the brothels, bars, cafes, and restaurants of the red-light districts. The client market also diversified and expanded. Along with Korean men of means there were Japanese men, Chinese men, men from Europe and America, nationalists, communists, Christians and Buddhists. Men of every ideological stripe frequented (sometimes the same) brothels. In this new economy the possibilities for advancement and material success were being transformed by capitalism. Suddenly stories appeared of kisaeng who had made a fortune through their professional success, canny networking and investments. Capitalism, and the transformative possibilities for individual success that it promised, seemed most compellingly illustrated by kisaeng who in a few years had gone from being the lowest of the traditional caste system to the exemplars of the dizzying heights of the colony’s nouveau riche (Roh 2012: 214).
While kisaeng are important and notable figures in the history of sex work in modern Korea, they account for only a portion of the varieties of sex work in the colony. Changes to the employment market for women and the status of single Korean women and girls in the Empire became more precarious as colonial rule progressed and Korea was drawn ever more deeply into Japan’s expansionist policies in Asia. After the Manchurian Incident of 1931 Japan began to expand its imperialist ambitions into China and Korea played an extremely important role as the strategic and economic heartland of colonialism. Over the 1930s and into the 1940s Korean people were drawn into the war. They were mobilised into the Japanese Army in the second Sino-Japanese War (1937—45); sent to work in factories and mines in the early 1940s in Japan and Manchuria to make up for the wartime labour shortage; or recruited/kidnapped to work in the so-called ‘comfort stations’ (ianjo) of the Imperial Japanese Army. It would be a mistake, however, to decontextualise the former ‘comfort women’ from the general labour market for women and girls operative in the 1920s and 1930s. Rather than being an isolated product of extreme wartime conditions, the idea of ‘comfort women’ came about within an already established system of bonded labour within the prostitution economy in colonial Korea. The ‘comfort women’ system relied upon the same unregulated labour market, duplicitous recruiting strategies and desperate poverty which characterised the female labour market in the colony (Song 1997: 214).
The euphemistic term ‘comfort women’ (in Japanese ianfu; in Korean wianbu) is sometimes replaced with the term ‘sex slavery’ to convey the coercion practised on the women and girls brought to labour, in horrendous conditions, for the soldiers in Japan’s overseas armies. The ‘comfort stations’ where they were housed and performed their work have also been called ‘rape camps’ to underline that the women were forced to acquiesce to violence, as well as sexual intercourse. Although ‘comfort women’ came from many different countries, the majority (around 80 per cent) were Korean. Here, the colonial policy of ‘assimilation’ reveals its logic, whereby Koreans occupied the position of ‘inferior but favoured’. In the hierarchy of Japan’s growing Empire, Koreans inhabited a special position. Fluent in Japanese as they had grown up in a state and education system managed by Japan, Koreans were both closest to power and the most available for use. The memoirs and testimonies of the former comfort women also contain stories of their encounters in the field of war in China with Korean soldiers drafted into the Japanese Kwantung Army (Howard: 1996).
The first known ‘comfort station’ was established in Shanghai in 1932. In the early stages of the war in China comfort stations had two official functions: they were instituted to control the spread of venereal disease, and they were believed to prevent the rape of other women: an important strategic issue for an occupying army that was trying to pacify the local population. So, ‘comfort women’ were to act as buffers to rape, to absorb the energies of rapists, as it were. From 1938 the Japanese military decided not to use local Chinese women as they were thought to pose too much of a security threat. From this time large numbers of women began to be shipped in from Korea. As fighting became deadlocked in China the comfort stations took on a new significance. Soldiers of the Japanese Empire stayed in the field for longer and longer stretches of time, so to compensate soldiers for their long tours of duty comfort stations became an important source of reward for the men. Comfort stations varied in both size and function. The largest were permanent structures attached to large supply bases in major cities. These were followed by semi-permanent stations attached to army units and run sometimes by the army and sometimes by private citizens. The most dangerous were the temporary stations that were set up near the front lines by the battalions themselves. Vulnerable to shelling and enemy attack, few women survived these encampments.
We know about the former ‘comfort women’ from a variety of sources. There are testimonies by the women themselves collected by NGOs and available on film, in print, and seen live at public gatherings and in speeches and addresses by survivors addressing campaigns for redress, including the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual
Slavery held in Tokyo in 2000. They are mentioned in Japanese military policy documents and the memoirs and diaries of serving army officers, soldiers and medical officers. In fact, information about the existence of the ‘comfort women’ circulated innocuously in South Korea and Japan for decades after 1945: they appeared in fiction, film, memoirs, and reminiscences of the late colonial period and the war, long before it became a gender issue and political scandal. Although 80 per cent of the estimated 80,000—100,000 comfort women were Korean, their existence was never broached in the 14-year negotiations for reparation Korea conducted with Japan, and which concluded in 1965 with the Republic of Korea—Japan Normalisation Treaty (Soh 2008: 45). When Japan was defeated in 1945 and Korea was ‘liberated’, survivors of the ‘comfort women’ system related that they hid amidst the celebrations of national independence for fear they would be accused of being collaborators with the former colonisers (Gil 2009). A number of returned former ‘comfort women’ found careers in the South Korean sex industry, as sex workers and later as Madams.
After the surrender of Japan in August 1945 Koreans who had been dispatched to the farthest reaches of the war theatre began to return home. Millions boarded boats and trains and took to the roads. One survivor reported that it took her three years to walk home from China where she found herself at war’s end, peddling goods on the road to support herself on her journey back to Korea (Yang 2008: 98). These repatriates returned to a country that was liberated, but desperately poor. Some of the first businesses to reopen in this liberation period were kisaeng houses. It is worth dwelling for a moment on the striking disconnection in this period between national political aspirations and the opportunities for women. The three years after the surrender of Japan is known in Korean history as the Liberation Period (1945—48), when Korea at last had the chance to govern itself. Compressed into this era is a euphoric energy about self-government, long-awaited political and economic reform and accompanying social change, and a hardening of ideological divisions between conservatives and radicals which took shape as communist North and capitalist South. If we ask about the reality of women’s lives in this longed-for Liberation Period, we find that they returned to a labour market eager for single, destitute women. Women’s magazines of the time were ill-equipped to address readers’ compelling questions about their economic prospects. In response to a reader’s desperately candid enquiry “How does a single woman returning to Korea with no money avoid prostitution?” the magazine Puin [Lady] retorts that the profession will soon die out in liberated Korea (‘Hwaryugye Ydsfing-ui Kalgil’ 1949: 71).