In the final stages of the Second World War the United States and the Soviet Union had negotiated a joint occupation of Korea. After Japan’s surrender Soviet troops moved to occupy the north, and American forces took control of the southern part of the peninsula whose dividing line became the 38th parallel. As Japan’s total war came to an end, and people stationed in far off ports of the empire began to return home to Korea, a new occupation government was established in Seoul. As we have noted, the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of people saw a proliferation of sex workers and kisaeng as widows, orphans and lone women sought employment in the war-shattered economy (Barraclough 2012). When the Korean War broke out in June 1950, South Korea became host to a UN force which included soldiers from the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Katherine Moon argues that the Korean War, with its accompanying poverty, social chaos, separation of families, and creation of orphans and single parent households, ‘mass produced’ prostitutes (Moon 1997: 5) and camp followers. Sarah Soh has uncovered evidence of a domestic ‘comfort women’ system run by the
Republic of Korea (South Korean) Army during the Korean War for their own troops (Soh 2008: 49). Far from being a single, extreme case of Japanese colonial exploitation, the ‘comfort station’ system clearly appealed to Korea’s own national army who adapted it for use for their own soldiers. This revelation underscores the political, social and gender climate in post-war Korea which combined to actively silence the ‘comfort women’ and suppress the notion of sexual violence against women in wartime as a crime.
After the Korean War drew to a close in 1953 the US Army stayed on in the South. Some women in the camp towns that sprang up around the US bases in South Korea following the cease-fire were children of former ‘comfort women’ (Byun 1997). Many had grown up in the industry, some beginning work at the age of sixteen. Brothels in military camp towns ran on a debt bondage system where the club owner laid out funds to set up the women in a furnished room, then charged them for their debt at usurious interest rates. Korean women who worked in camp towns also suffered social stigma in wider Korean society for consorting with ‘foreign’ men. Katherine Moon reports that some were disowned by their families, and some gravitated to the camp towns as a kind of self-exile, after experiencing abuse that they believed made them unfit for ‘normal society’. Moon also writes about how some women aspired to marry a soldier in order to have access to a ‘normal’ life as wife and mother in the USA that was unavailable to them in Korea (Moon 1997: 3—4). This is the crucial context for camp towns and the international migration that they enabled: camp towns were a real option for women seeking work in the context of the relentless class and gender violence under the military regime in South Korea. In the context of the wider employment market for women, camp towns were lucrative. In a 1965 study of over one hundred sex workers in Yongsan, site of the largest military base in Korea, all women were supporting between one and eight members of their family. This was unimaginable on the wages of a female factory worker or a schoolteacher.
In addition, the soldiers with whom these women established relationships were, like the women, from the underclass of their own society. That over hundred thousand South Korean women married servicemen and emigrated to the United States alerts us to the fact that both sex workers and soldiers were looking for love and companionship in the camp towns. While camp towns remain in South Korea they do not occupy the same niche in the sex industry that they once did. The 1960s and 1970s were the boom period for camp towns as the high US dollar (the currency of the bases) made them attractive to small scale businesses. Limited upward mobility was also possible within the camp towns: whether to self-employed sex worker or to wife of a US serviceman.
The profile of women seeking work in South Korea’s camp towns has changed over the past twenty years. In the 1990s Korea’s rapid economic development led to a shortage of Korean women willing to work as prostitutes for the military. The stigma attached to this work, the relatively weak value of the US dollar and, most crucially, the opening up of new employment avenues made sex work a less attractive prospect to women. At the same time, Korea was entering a new era of globalisation and for the first time the domestic employment market was opening up to immigrant workers who came to do the least desirable jobs — jobs that even the poorest sector of Korean society had left behind. In the camp towns women started to be recruited from the Philippines and the former Soviet Union to fill the vacancies caused by Korean women leaving the industry.
These women enter Korea on E-6 entertainment visas, usually for one year, and surrender their passports upon arrival to their employers. Passports and a portion of the women’s salaries are confiscated by employers until their contract is complete, to prevent them from running away. Sealing Cheng’s ethnographic research into the Filipinas working in South Korea’s camp towns found that most women were in their early twenties and only a few had experience working in clubs before coming to Korea. Cheng writes that, ‘reasons cited for coming to Korea included wanting to make money for their family and themselves, to see the world, and to show their independence’ (Cheng 2008: 14). While the nationality of camp town sex workers has changed, the profile of customers has also altered. The early prohibition on male Korean nationals patronising military camp towns has been lifted, and Korean men as well as visitors to Korea on business now frequent the clubs. Korean men now have more spending power than the US servicemen and Korean clients have become an important source of revenue for the camp town bars and clubs, drawn by the perceived ‘exoticness’ of the immigrant sex workers.