U.S. Role in Korean Prostitution Ring

Two of the greatest travesties against humanity occurred during WWII. The first and most famous was the Holocaust, a riveting example of in-group/out-group mentality documented meticulously by Richard Evans and John Jay Lipton.

But a lesser known tragedy occurred in China and Korea. China is partially known for the "Rape of Nanking", photographs and survivor recollections of this event rank as one of the most horrific things you can ever see or read.

However, a lesser known horror was that the Japanese enslaved Korean women and used them as sex slaves on ships and for their home base. In the story given by Niall Ferguson, a woman has sex from sun-up until sun-down. If she contracts a venereal disease, a doctor gives her a shot of penicillin, and she is given two days to recover.

Ex-prostitutes now charge that their government operated much the same during the Korean War. While none were enslaved, they were coerced in other manners:

But the women suggest that the government also viewed them as commodities to be used to shore up the country’s struggling economy in the decades after the Korean War. They say the government not only sponsored classes for them in basic English and etiquette — meant to help them sell themselves more effectively — but also sent bureaucrats to praise them for earning dollars when South Korea was desperate for foreign currency.

“They urged us to sell as much as possible to the G.I.’s, praising us as ‘dollar-earning patriots,’ ” Ms. Kim said.

The United States military, the scholars say, became involved in attempts to regulate the trade in so-called camp towns surrounding the bases because of worries about sexually transmitted diseases.

In one of the most incendiary claims, some women say that the American military police and South Korean officials regularly raided clubs from the 1960s through the 1980s looking for women who were thought to be spreading the diseases. They picked out the women using the number tags the women say the brothels forced them to wear so the soldiers could more easily identify their sex partners.

The Korean police would then detain the prostitutes who were thought to be ill, the women said, locking them up under guard in so-called monkey houses, where the windows had bars. There, the prostitutes were forced to take medications until they were well.

The women, who are seeking compensation and an apology, have compared themselves to the so-called comfort women who have won widespread public sympathy for being forced into prostitution by the Japanese during World War II. Whether prostitutes by choice, need or coercion, the women say, they were all victims of government policies.

“If the question is, was there active government complicity, support of such camp town prostitution, yes, by both the Korean governments and the U.S. military,” said Katharine H. S. Moon, a scholar who wrote about the women in her 1997 book, “Sex Among Allies.”

Source: NY Times