While prostitution for US troops in the post-war period is tied to US neo-colonial and economic interests in the Korean peninsula, the growth of a domestic prostitution industry for local clients is connected to the creation of a new urban proletariat in industrialising South Korea. When major general Park Chung Hee (1917—79) seized power in a military coup in 1961 his strategy to legitimise the military regime was to promise economic development and security in the face of the threat from Communist North Korea. Young women and girls left rural areas in their thousands to take up jobs in the towns and cities of newly industrialising South Korea. Expected to make a contribution to the family finances, these females remitted their wages home to support the family or pay for a brother to stay in school and compete for the rigorous college entrance examinations. In this way the prospect of earning their own money and gaining professional skills in the employment market was circumscribed by prevailing gender ideologies on the subordinate position of the young women within their families.
Factory jobs were competitive and arduous, and it was not easy to avoid sexual harassment on the job or in the factory districts. By the mid-1970s the effects of more than a decade of industrialisation policies were starting to be felt as the middle class expanded and a new growing service sector competed with the manufacturing sector in the employment of young women. The entertainment districts thrived under the patronage of a large military class, the guardians of the anti-communist South Korean state. With economic development a new, unevenly spread prosperity came to some sectors of the middle and upper-middle classes. Rural migrants who could not find conventional employment were drawn to the myriad of jobs available in the booming informal sector. Despite, or perhaps because of, the evening curfew (a nightly feature of the anti-communist security state), bars, drinking parties, brothels, massage parlours and room salons were packed with customers and professionals. This was the ubiquitous sul munhwa or liquor culture of the last decade of the military regime, the 1980s.
Visitors to Korea at this time could not help but notice the incongruity of an entertainment culture saturated with the ethos of sex work, and the conventional cult of female virginity which made premarital sexual relations almost impossible for young couples (on gender relations in contemporary South Korea, see Hyaeweol Choi in this volume). Clearly, the state morality of self-discipline, anti-communist patriotism and family piety needed a liquor-soaked outlet from time to time. Women employed in the sex industry in these years were both exploited and agentive. Working in highly exploitative conditions and exposed to violence in the brothels and on the streets, some were nevertheless able to buy themselves a small business with their earnings. When they retired, some opened tourist shops or small restaurants in Itaewon, a tourism and prostitution centre. Others became brothel managers, and were well-positioned to negotiate the import of a new generation of sex workers from overseas as the industry diversified in the 1990s.