![]() ![]() No law has achieved any significant steps towards eliminating prostitution, not the Prostitution Prevention Law, which mandates up to one year in prison or else a fine of up to three million won for both the prostitute and the client, nor the Juvenile Protection Act, which mandates up to one year in prison for paying for sexual services from a minor. According to a report by the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Women’s Development Institute, “There are one million women engaged in prostitution” in South Korea. These things continued after the war ended and prostitution still exists in South Korea today, so much so that the country has even been called a “prostitution paradise”. Nevertheless, sexual violence and prostitution do exist outside of war. Rather, the same thing spread to all the areas around where troops were stationed and a sort of de facto licensed prostitution system developed. Furthermore, this was not purely a phenomenon of my own home village. With that it took no time at all for us to make the transformation to “prostitution village”. The prostitutes kept the village sexually safe, and the fact that we could also make a profit by renting rooms to them was just an added bonus. The villagers supported the prostitutes, even though they were outsiders, while viewing prostitution as a necessary evil in order to protect the chastity of their own family members and relatives. Once we had justified this to ourselves, we even turned it into a source of revenue. To ward off sexual assaults by violent soldiers, the villagers slackened their rigid traditions of Confucian sexual morality and accepted prostitution. In other words, we invited the prostitutes in as a means of self-defense, and that is how we became a “prostitution village”. We had the real fear that, without them, all of the women in the village might become the target of sexual assault. The prostitutes were the village’s saviors. When the US Army came to our village there was an explosion of sexual violence, and when prostitutes flocked to the village, we welcomed them in the way that I described earlier. What I saw was reminiscent of Oliver Stone’s film, Platoon. The question which I want to pose to the reader is, “What would you be capable of if your life was at risk every day.” During and after an intense, bloody battle, it seemed as if the soldiers had gone insane. This is the most important life lesson that I learned from the war.Įven the sex crimes of some soldiers become momentarily understandable if we assume that they are on the battlefield. That is the reason why we forgave those among us who became communist and we warmly accepted into our village women who had been prostitutes. Actually, I suppose that was pretty much the same experience for all the other villagers. To be blunt, I saw with my own eyes and I know that even the greatest outrages like sexual assault will be tolerated in those circumstances. Why is it that comfort women appeared on the battlefield? Things like Confucian morality vanish in a time of war when people are concerned only with their own survival, but this is not easy for people who have never experienced war to understand. Condoms had once seemed to us like the incarnation of sexual vice, but we learned to stop worrying about that. At my uncle’s house condoms could be procured cheaply so he cut them into long, thin strips with a razor to make rubber strings and set up a business of sewing them into the ankle part of socks. Children filled them up with water and played with them. Whenever it rained you could see condoms flowing everywhere. The US Army stockpiled condoms in order to protect its men from STDs. The Origins of the US Army’s Korean Comfort Women Professor at Dong-a University, Professor Emeritus at Hiroshima University The Origins of the US Army’s Korean Comfort Women (3) ![]()
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