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Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S./Korea Relations, by Katharine H.S. Moon
As a child growing up in South Korea, I was taught at an early age that there were good Korean women and bad Korean women. Perhaps I was four or five. I learned that there were women to be admired, praised, emulated--like my grandmother, a sacrificial mother and trustworthy wife--and women to be noticed only from the corner of an eye, never to be spoken about. I was never to copy their heavy eyeliner-look, never to imitate their close walk side by side a foreigner in uniform. The foreigner was the U.S. GI stationed in Korea, and the woman, a kijich'on (military camptown) prostitute.
The selling and buying of sex by Koreans and Americans have been a staple of U.S.-Korean relations since the Korean War (1950-53) and the permanent stationing of U.S. troops in Korea since 1955. It would not be far-fetched to say that more American men have become familiar with camptown prostitution in Korea since the 1950s than with military strategy and Korea's GNP figures. Since the war, over one million Korean women have served as sex providers for the U.S. military. 1 And millions of Koreans and Americans have shared a sense of special bonding, for they have together shed blood in battle and mixed blood through sex and Amerasian offspring.
U.S. military-oriented prostitution in Korea is not simply a matter of women walking the streets and picking up U.S. soldiers for a few bucks. It is a system that is sponsored and regulated by two governments, Korean and American (through the U.S. military). The U.S. military and the Korean government have referred to such women as "bar girls," "hostesses," "special entertainers," "businesswomen," and "comfort women." Koreans have also called these women the highly derogatory names, yanggalbo (Western whore) and yanggongju (Western princess). As this study reveals, both governments have viewed such prostitution as a means to advance the "friendly relations" of both countries and to keep U.S. soldiers, "who fight so hard for the freedom of the South Korean people," happy. 2 The lives of Korean women working as prostitutes in military camptowns have been inseparably tied to the activities and welfare of the U.S. military installations since the early 1950s. To varying degrees, USFK (U.S. Forces, Korea) and ROK authorities have controlled where, when, and how these "special entertainers" work and live. The first half of the 1970s witnessed the consolidation of such joint U.S.-ROK control.
This book attempts to bring two strands of U.S.-Korea relations together, the first being a story about people-to-people relations in the camptowns and the second about state-to-state relations between Seoul and Washington. We have a tendency to understand foreign relations as sets of policies that are formulated and executed by an elite group of men in dark suits, as abstracted from individual lives, especially in the lowest reaches of society.
Kijich'on women, who occupy those reaches, would then be destined to invisibility and silence, though in fact, evidence shows that they were very much an integral part of the tensions and negotiations between U.S. and ROK officials in the 1970s. By following both strands and knitting them together, the hope is to reveal how private relations among people and foreign relations between governments inform and are informed by each other. Specifically, we shall explore how and why these women became a symbol of the Korean government's desire for and the USFK's assurance and commitment to a continued, large U.S. military presence in Korea in the context of the Nixon Doctrine; this change in foreign policy mandated a 20,000 reduction of U.S. troops from Korea (chapter 3). In short, the focus is on the role of the women as instruments in the promotion of two governments' bilateral security interests.
There is another hope contained in the writing of this book: to help lift the curtains of invisibility that have shrouded the kijich'on women's existence and to offer these pages as passageway for their own voices. Many of the women I met and learned about while conducting field research in Korea (1991-92) were far from silent when engaged. They often offered biting criticisms of the Korean government, the U.S. military, of American life, and of one another's child-rearing habits, relationships with GI customers, and make-up style. They ranged widely in personality, age, reasons for selling sex, adaptation to kijich'on life, and future aspirations. But they also shared some commonalities: The vast majority of the prostitutes in the 1950s to the 1970s had barely completed elementary school; junior high graduates were considered highly educated among such women. 3 Most, especially among the earlier generations of prostitutes (1950s-70s), came from poor families in Korea's countryside, with one parent or both parents missing or unable to provide for numerous family members. The earliest prostitutes were camp followers of troops during the Korean War; they did laundry, cooked, and tended to the soldiers' sexual demands. Some had been widowed by the war, others orphaned or lost during a family's flight from bombs and grenades. Many of the kijich'on prostitutes considered themselves "fallen women" even before entering prostitution because they had lost social status and self-respect from divorce, rape, sex, and/or pregnancy out of wedlock. For these women, camptowns served as a place of self-exile as well as a last resort for earning a livelihood.
The vast majority of these women have experienced in common the pain of contempt and stigma from the mainstream Korean society. These women have been and are treated as trash, "the lowest of the low," in a Korean society characterized by classist (family/educational status-oriented) distinctions and discrimination. The fact that they have mingled flesh and blood with foreigners (yangnom) 4 in a society that has been racially and culturally homogeneous for thousands of years makes them pariahs, a disgrace to themselves and their people, Korean by birth but no longer Korean in body and spirit. Neo-Confucian moralism regarding women's chastity and strong racialist conscience among Koreans have branded these women as doubly "impure." The women themselves bear the stigma of their marginalization both physically and psychologically. They tend not to venture out of camptowns and into the larger society and view themselves as "abnormal," while repeatedly referring to the non-camptown world as "normal." Once they experience kijich'on life, they are irreversibly tainted: it is nearly impossible for them to reintegrate themselves into "normal" Korean society. Kim Yang Hyang, in the documentary The Women Outside, recalls how her family members rejected her when she returned to her village after working for a time in the kijich'on. One of her cousins told her, "Don't come around our place." 5
As a result of the rejection by their own countryfolks, the women (except the very old) keep their eye on the prize: marriage to a U.S. serviceman. As the legal wife of a U.S. soldier, her hope is to leave behind the poverty, shame, and alienation experienced in Korea and begin life anew in the United States. As a wife and mother, she hopes to fulfill all the obligations and dreams that her country expected of her as a Korean woman but denied to her as a kijich'on prostitute.
During my preliminary research trip to Korea in the winter of 1990, I met "Johnston's Mom" in Songsan, Uijongbu, north of Seoul. I was introduced to her by staff workers at My Sister's Place (Turebang), a social service and counseling center run by the Women's Division of the Korean Presbyterian Church and staffed mostly by hard-working college students and young activists. I entered a run-down cement building-front off an alley in Songsan and into a small dark room with gray cement walls and a few pots and pans--the kitchen. In an adjoining room was Johnston's Mom, in her late twenties, sitting on her bedding on the floor, busily packing large cardboard boxes with what looked to me like thousands of white toothbrushes. She greeted me without looking at me and never interrupted her packing pace.
Johnston's Mom had been living in this unheated, cement-cold hut of a home for several months with her two sons, "Johnston" and "Joey." Both boys were Amerasian and had different fathers. Johnston was about six years old and Joey two. Until very recently, there had been a fourth resident, a U.S. soldier who had been feeding the boys and their mom in return for the sex she provided him. The two adults had what is common in camptowns, a "contract cohabitation" (kyeyak tonggo) relationship, whereby a serviceman and a prostitute have an agreement that they will shack up together for a given period of time. A woman in this live-in arrangement is considered to be at the higher end of the kijich'on prostitute hierarchy because her situation closely resembles a marriage situation and because she does not have to walk the streets or hostess at a club, where most women pick up GIs. My Sister's Place staff members later informed me that Johnston's Mom and the U.S. GI had regular sex in the same room with the boys--there was nowhere else to go. Johnston at the time had problems at school--other Korean children made fun of him because he looked different and because some found out that his mother was a GI prostitute. Both boys ran around without adequate clothing in the cold Korean winter and giggled and tumbled in front of me while I silently endured the cold.
Johnston's Mom, because her "contract lover" had abandoned her before their term was over, had to stuff the boxes with toothbrushes to earn about 150,000 won ($197) a month to keep her boys alive. As I watched her, I saw a rather gaunt, haggard, and aged woman before me, not a mythical sex-pot looking for fleshly pleasure or a Suzy Wong versed in the powers of seduction. She spoke bluntly and had a short temper. There was no pretense in her voice or words, no formality, while her sense of humor was robust. She said good-bye to me, again not batting an eye, while she mechanically stuffed the box with toothbrushes.
"Bakery Auntie," unlike Johnston's Mom, had no children and no family. She lived alone in a rented room in Songsan, near My Sister's Place. She had been working for about a year in the small bakery set up at the center when I met her at the end of 1991. The bakery, consisting of an oven, baking tins, and a few mixing bowls, had been set up in 1990 as alternative employment for women who wanted to get out of the sex trade or were too old to earn money off their bodies. When I first met Bakery Auntie, I was struck by how young and well-kept she looked for an elderly woman. She had coal black hair, lightly powdered skin, and extremely long eyelashes that were obviously fake. Yet, she seemed to be well past her sixties. I was soon after advised by the My Sister's Place staff never to address her as halmoni (grandmother) and never to ask her if her eyelashes are fake. Otherwise, I would have to endure her unleashed wrath and be considered her enemy forever. I later learned that for Bakery Auntie, who had worked and lived as a military prostitute for nearly all of her 67 years, youth and feminine beauty were her most highly regarded possessions. Without them, she believed she would starve. She had been walking the kijich'on streets even until she was 65, offering GIs nearly a third her age tricks for cheap. My Sister's Place staff people had felt great sympathy for her and persuaded her to visit the center and get off the streets.
Although Bakery Auntie received the attention and friendship of the staff and other kijich'on women at My Sister's Place, she remained continuously distrustful and nervous. She had had a history of severe physical and psychological abuse by her pimps. She had a constant fear of losing people who became close to her and had difficulty relating to people as an equal. It had taken her six months at My Sister's Place to eat her meals with the other women because she had been accustomed to eating alone, hiding from pimps who had yelled at her for wasting work time by eating. Even when she was able to join the other women at the common table, owing to much encouragement and prodding by the folks at My Sister's Place, she usually inhaled her bowl of rice in vacuum cleaner-like speed and left the table abruptly to head for the kitchen and solitude. One of her greatest fears was that she would have no one to care for her in her old age and that she might die alone.
This woman, who had been born in the early 1920s, had received very little formal education but had plenty of knowledge and wisdom to impart. During one of my visits to My Sister's Place, she once mentioned that Japan got rich off the Korean War and that South Korea did the same off the Vietnam War. She also once asked me if I knew why the United States had fought Iraq in the Gulf War. When I asked her to tell me, she stated that it was the U.S. military-industrial complex that wanted the war; the United States had amassed too many fancy weapons, she said, that had to be used. Immediately following such words, she would say under her breath, "But what do I know? I have no brain. I am uneducated."
"Sonha's Mom," when I met her in the spring of 1992 in Anjongni, near Camp Humphreys, was one of three women in the same family who had worked and lived as kijich'on prostitutes. She and her younger sister had two different African-American fathers. Their elderly mother, ill and weak, upon my visit to their home, had been a GI prostitute catering to black Americans during the 1950s and 1960s. Sonha's Mom, then 35, and her younger sister, then 30, had both worked in camptown bars. Sonha's Mom had four children of her own, all of Korean-African-American descent, by different men. Sonha's Mom and sister were fully Korean in their speech, mannerisms, and customs. But they were fully aware that there was no Korea for them outside the small camptown. Because of their black skin and racial features, their marginalization from Korean society was most severe. Their obvious physical connection with kijich'on prostitution and camptown life was a matter never discussed or revealed even to their relatives. One of their cousins, who was racially all Korean, had come for a visit to introduce his new wife to the Anjongni family. In the midst of these visitors, I upset the feeble grandmother by asking Sonha's Mom and her sister questions about kijich'on life. Sonha's Mom took me aside and informed me that her mother feared that such talk would reveal the family's shameful history to the visiting relatives.
For many kijich'on women, their pariah status is due to the unique demographic and cultural constitution of the camptowns in which they live and the particular prejudices of Korean people regarding race, class, and Western influence. Camptowns adjoining or near U.S. military installations in Korea, especially the large army camptowns, are mostly located near the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea, where the bulk of both the North's and the U.S./South's troops and armaments are placed. Kyonggi Province has housed the bulk of both U.S. troops and Korean sex workers from the 1950s to the 1970s; in 1977, 18,551 of the estimated 36,924 prostitutes worked in this province. 6 Kijich'on towns are also hybrid towns, possessing elements of America and Korea in the bodies of their residents, English and Korean language store signs, U.S. military slogans and logos juxtaposed with dolls garbed in traditional Korean dress. But camptowns are also places that are "neither America nor Korea," where "Konglish" (a fusion of broken English and broken Korean) is often heard on the streets and in the bars and nightclubs and where Amerasian children themselves serve as living testimony to the mix between different races. They are stage sets, in a sense, for the U.S. military presence in Korea, characterized by dimly lit alleys blinking with neon-lit bars boasting names like Lucky Club, Top Gun, or King Club. The alleys rock with loud country-western or disco music, drunken brawls, and American soldiers in fatigues and heavily made-up Korean women walking closely together with hands on each other's buttocks.
Along with the seediness of these areas arose social disorder, violence, and crime. With the establishment of these shantytowns in the 1950s and Ô60s came an influx of not only poor women and war orphans but entrepreneurs and criminals seeking fortune off the U.S. dollar and anonymity from the law. For the majority of Koreans, names of cities such as Tongduch'ôn, Osan, and Kunsan have become synonymous with prostitution, drunken U.S. soldiers, social deviance, and immorality. One physician working in the local venereal disease (VD) 7 clinic in Tongduch'ôn reminded me during an interview in the spring of 1992 that these areas are so tainted by the history of criminality and deviance that even nonprostitute girls or young women who reside in these areas have difficulty finding decent Korean men who will marry them. By frequenting these camptowns during my research stay in Korea, I also became suspect: some of my Korean relatives in Seoul urged me not to visit the camptowns so often and definitely not to share meals with the prostitutes, lest I catch a terrible disease. Others insisted that I be silent about my research to nonfamily persons, lest they question my moral character and family background.
The bulk of the kijich'on prostitutes' pariah status and social marginalization is due to Korean society's contempt for what I call the women's "cusp" status. The prostitutes' imitations of Western dress, hair, and make-up style, especially in the earlier days of kijich'on prostitution, their loud utterances of Konglish, their heavy drinking and cigarette-smoking, and fraternization and sexual relations with "yangnom" marked a Korean society caught between tradition and Westernized modernity. The character of Yonghi, a "U.N. Lady," in the popularly acclaimed Korean novel and film, Silver Stallion, 8 aptly embodies this kind of cusp status that makes the residents of "Kumsan Village" shocked and contemptuous of her look and behavior as a yanggalbo. Mansik, one of the main characters, describes the strangeness of these women's attire:
| short blue-black skirts that exposed not only the bare skin of their calves but the whole round shape of their hips, and brightly colored blouses without any sleeves at all that revealed the ugly marks of cowpox shots on their shoulders for everybody to see. Their peculiar hair, in permanent waves, resembled upside-down bells, and both of them wore pointed, glossy leather shoes with high heels as sharp as hoe blades unlike the beautiful and elegant white or turquoise rubber shoes with exquisite flower patterns he was accustomed to seeing. 9 |
I think there is yet another, unspoken, reason why these women have been forced out of Korean consciousness for nearly half a decade: Koreans have not wanted reminders of the war lurking around them and the insecurity that their newfound wealth and international power have been built on. That is, kijich'on women are living symbols of the destruction, poverty, bloodshed, and separation from family of Korea's civil war. They are living testaments of Korea's geographical and political division into North and South and of the South's military insecurity and consequent dependence on the United States. The sexual domination of tens of thousands of Korean women by "Yangk'i foreigners" is a social disgrace and a "necessary evil" that South Koreans believe they have had to endure to keep U.S. soldiers on Korean soil, a compromise in national pride, all for the goal of national security. Such humiliation is a price paid by the "little brother" in the alliance for protection by the "big brother."
It is not a coincidence that a newfound public interest in the plight of kijich'on prostitutes in the mid-late 1980s and early 1990s occurred at a time of increased and sometimes intense anti-Americanism among Koreans. Social activists and antigovernment protesters have pointed to kijich'on prostitution as representative of U.S. domination over Korean politics and the continued presence of U.S. military bases as perpetuation of South Korea's neocolonial status vis-ˆ-vis the United States. 11 For anti-U.S. base activists, Korean independence from U.S. domination means the withdrawal of U.S. bases from Korea and the liberation of the kijich'on woman from the sexual domination of the GI.
The disregarding of kijich'on prostitutes as invisible and/or marginal has been apparent in academia and activism as well. Until very recently, social science scholarship on Korean women and society since the 1950s has focused mainly on women as low-paid, underskilled labor in Korea's rush to export-led economic growth. 12 But only since the early 1990s has there been any significant academic scrutiny of kijich'on prostitution, which has been around longer than the bulk of women's modern factory work.
A part of the reason for the dearth of academic interest in this subject is due to Korean social activists' own neglect of this issue. During my research stay in Korea from 1991 to 1992, I experienced many difficulties finding academics and activists who might be well-informed on camptown prostitution issues of the 1960s and Ô70s (the latter being the focal time of my research). One woman whom others had referred to as my "one sure bet" even admitted honestly that she and other long-time social activists had neglected the issue of camptown prostitution. She stated that she and others had focused their organizing attention and energy on organizing factory workers and protesting Japanese sex tourism in the 1970s (chapter 1), but that tackling the problem of camptown prostitution had never entered their minds. She confessed that she and her coworkers had never placed the kijich'on prostitutes in any framework of exploitation or oppression, that even most activists considered these women "too different" from themselves.
"Too different" was a polite way of saying what many Korean activists and academics today, even those who advocate on behalf of the former Korean "comfort women" to the Japanese military in World War II, still believe--kijich'on prostitutes work in the bars and clubs because they voluntarily want to lead a life of prostitution, because they are lacking in moral character. This kind of academic and activist negligence of kijich'on prostitutes is a function of the Korean society's bias against these women--that they are an "untouchable" class, that they have already departed so far from the norms and values of mainstream society to deserve consideration of the political, economic, and cultural sources of their unenviable existence. Faye Moon, a cofounder of My Sister's Place, noted, "Students often become anti-American and shout Ô Yankee go Home' when they demonstrate. However, most Korean students have never visited an ÔAmerican' military town in Korea. They are unaware of the oppression which takes place in these villages." 13 Students began visiting and extending their solidarity to kijich'on prostitutes only as recently as 1990. 14
But there is a deeper underlying reason for these women's invisiblity even among progressive Korean activists and academics. For most of the post-civil war period, South Koreans have lived with military threat from the North and the presence of U.S. troops as givens that were not questioned, and the administrations of former generals-turned-presidentsPak Chonghui (1961-1979), Chon Tuhwan (1980-87), and Ro T'aeu (1987-1992) kept popular criticism of both domestic and foreign governmental policy at bay with authoritarian measures. Anticommunist and national security rhetoric was regularly employed to muster society's support for the government's economic and foreign policies as well as to stifle political dissent, protest, and inquiries into alternative interpretations of political issues such as the need for the U.S. troop presence and the terms of the U.S.-Korea alliance. Under the national security blanket, the work and lives of kijich'on prostitutes became integrally embedded in the work and lives of the U.S. soldiers, who provided protection deemed vital to the South Korean people's viability and prosperity. In a sense, to inquire into the plight of kijich'on prostitutes and to question their role in U.S. camptown life would have been to raise questions about the need for and the role of U.S. troops and bases in the two countries' bilateral relations.
Beginning in the early-to-mid 1980s, the writings of Cynthia Enloe and other feminist scholars focused for the first time on military prostitution as a subject of study in political science, especially as a critique of military ideology and lifestyle. They have asserted that the very maintenance of the military establishment depends on promoting gendered notions of femininity and masculinity, weakness and strength, conquered and conqueror. Such feminist critiques point to the linkage between military prowess and male (hetero)sexual prowess as the basis of discrimination against, subordination of, and violence toward women. Women as war booty and slaves are examples of past relationships between women and war; 15 women as victims of wartime rape in Bosnia and forced prostitution as Japanese "comfort women" are the most recent examples of sexual abuse wreaked on women by men in war.
Enloe in particular has been a pioneer in defining the nature of military prostitution as not simply a women's issue, sociological problem, or target of disease control, but as a matter of international politics and national security. In all three of her recent books on gender and international relations, she points out that seemingly private conduct, such as sexual relations between men and women, are intimately related to international politics through their organization and institutionalization by public authorities and help to inform and maintain the masculinist military ideology on which the regular operations of international political institutions depend:
| None of these institutions--multilateral alliances, bilateral alliances, foreign military assistance programmes--can achieve their militarizing objectives without controlling women for the sake of militarizing men. ( Enloe's italics) 16 |
| A military base isn't simply an institution for servicing bombers, fighters, aircraft carriers, or a launch-pad for aggressive forays into surrounding territories. A military base is also a package of presumptions about the male soldier's sexual needs, the local society's sexual needs, and about the local society's resources for satisfying those needs. Massage parlors are as integral to Subic Bay, the mammoth U.S. naval base in the Philippines, as its dry docks. 17 |
| Insofar as the expansion or retraction of any foreign power's overseas bases increases or decreases the demand for women's sexual availability to male soldiers or sailors, the Pentagon's changing Asian strategy is a "women's issue." (Enloe's italics) 18 |
Although it is helpful to understand military prostitution as a function of masculinist norms and practices in militaries, the "gender lens" alone fails to address the political context in which international institutions--alliances, military assistance programs, and overseas military bases--seek to control women and gender constructs for the sake of pursuing their "militarizing objectives." Since the institutionalizing of military prostitution involves a social, economic, and political process, overseas military prostitution must be examined in the context of interaction between foreign governments and among governments and local groups. The challenge in this book is to analyze the interstate context(s) that determine what Enloe herself admits feminists know little about: "how bargains are struck between influential civilians in a garrison town and the local military commanders." 19 .
The specific intergovernmental context in focus here is the disparities in power (unequal military, economic, and diplomatic capabilities) between the Republic of Korea and the United States during the first half of the 1970s, which marked the beginning of U.S. distance from Asian military conflict, with the application of the Nixon Doctrine. This study of U.S.-Korea kijich'on prostitution seeks to strengthen and refine feminist analysis of foreign policy by asking when, how, and why governments use women, not just gendered ideology, as instruments of foreign policy, how specific uses affect women's lives, and if participation in the process politicizes the women's self-identities. In the process, we may find that women are more directly involved in international politics than through their part in gendered schemes of power, that their relationship with foreign soldiers personify and define, not only underlie, relations between governments.
Although we rarely, if ever, think of women and prostitution as actors and issues in foreign policy, the following pages show that the sexual health and work conduct of Korean kijich'on prostitutes became an urgent and regular focus of joint U.S.-Republic of Korea (ROK) actions in the first half of the 1970s through the "Camptown Clean-Up Campaign" (also called "Purification Movement"). The 1971-76 Minutes of the U.S.-ROK Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) 20 Joint Committee and its Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Civil-Military Relations, which provide much of the historical documentation for this study, offer detailed descriptions of such actions. The five-year Clean-Up effort coincided with the Seoul government's desperate attempts to prevent further withdrawal of U.S. troops, begun under the Nixon Doctrine, and to gain the reaffirmation, through U.S. policy statements and increased military assistance, of Washington's commitment to South Korean security. Korean kijich'on prostitutes, through the Clean-Up Campaign, became integral to the efforts of the U.S. Forces in Korea and the Seoul government to secure firm U.S. military commitment to the Republic.
In chapter 1, I begin this exploration of the connections between the personal and the international with an overview of the development of U.S.-Korea kijich'on prostitution and its significance from the viewpoint of the U.S. military, the Korean government and public, and the prostitute women themselves. Here, I consider different approaches to analyzing overseas military prostitution, paying particular attention to the following questions: What kinds of factors help create and maintain it and for what ends? Do the ends coincide or conflict for the different actors involved? How fixed are the boundaries of private sexual relations and politics among nations? How is prostitution political?
Chapter 2 offers a brief discussion of relevant scholarly perspectives in international relations to help frame the following discussion of interstate relations and women. I argue that although power disparities do shape the larger framework of relations between governments and their relationship to women, the dynamic of organizational interests and coalition-building among different political actors, including prostitutes, determine the daily effects on women's lives.
Chapter 3 describes the policies and politics surrounding the Camptown Clean-Up Campaign (or Purification Movement) as a result of the Nixon Doctrine and the reduction of U.S. troops. The chapter particularly addresses the significance of the Campaign in organizing and facilitating US-Korea relations at the local level.
Chapter 4 focuses on the kijich'on prostitutes as the central objects of joint U.S.-Korea governmental control. This section illustrates how and why these women became "personal ambassadors" who were responsible for improving U.S.-Korea civil-military relations through their sexual relations with GIs and why the women became the main indicator of Seoul's willingness to accommodate the U.S. military's interests. Specifically, the Korean government intended to transform these women from "bad ambassadors" to "good ambassadors" by forcing them to accommodate the USFK's attempts at promoting nondiscriminatory behavior toward black GIs and strict VD control.
Chapter 5 places the Camptown Clean-Up Campaign in the larger context of the U.S.-ROK security relationship and examines the motivations of both the USFK and the Seoul government in conducting the Campaign. It argues that the application of the Nixon Doctrine to Korea drove the USFK leadership and the ROK government into each other's arms, thereby tightening their joint commitment to the preservation of a large U.S. troop presence in Korea and emphasizing the control of prostitutes as proof of such commitment. The chapter also highlights the disparity in political, military, and diplomatic power between Seoul and Washington as the reason why the USFK was able to coerce the Korean government to participate actively in the Campaign and extend its regulatory control over the kijich'on prostitutes.
Chapter 6 addresses some effects of the Purification Movement on two aspects of kijich'on women's lives--their work environment (bar/club life) and their bodies, and relatedly, their physical mobility and autonomy over their sexual labor. The chapter shows that the USFK, the Korean government, and local camptown power-holders promoted their respective interests, usually at the expense of the prostitutes,' and that for the USFK, the Clean-Up particularly functioned to silence the hitherto loud and unruly presence of kijich'on women in camptown politics. Moreover, the Clean-Up Campaign was a direct response to the noisy and disruptive protests that prostitutes staged to challenge U.S. domination in camptowns.
Finding and getting former prostitutes to talk with me was one of the most difficult aspects of the research because many had died and others had been forgotten by family members and camptown residents who had once known them. Many who are still living in camptowns experience ill health and loss of memory as a result of years of physical abuse, drug and alcohol intake, and psychological stress. Moreover, the women often lie about their camptown experiences because they are ashamed of revealing the past and because they have grown accustomed to lying as a means to survive in the camptowns. Several of the women I was introduced to did not cooperate, saying they had nothing to say or that they do not remember anything. I also gave up chances to interview several former prostitutes I befriended while traveling to various camptowns in Korea (It'aewon, Tongduch'ôn, Uijongbu, Osan, Kunsan) because to interview them as subjects of a study would have been to betray a trust and friendship they had sincerely offered to me. Many of the thoughts and experiences they shared in regular conversation, however, have informed my thinking and writing.
Kim Yonja, a former kijich'on prostitute of twenty-five years and now a missionary-activist who speaks out about kijich'on life and the plight of Amerasian children in the towns, served as a major source of information and inspiration. She is public about her experiences as a prostitute and believes that it is her Christian calling to expose the injustices inflicted on kijich'on women and their Amerasian children. I refer to her real name, not a pseudonym.
Lastly, many of the interviews took place over a series of meetings, over tea and meals, and in the company of other camptown prostitutes and staff members at various counseling centers. I also offered English lessons at My Sister's Place and got to know different women. Like many Koreans, most camptown women of the older generations do not have a concept of a research interview, where two strangers talk simply to ask and answer questions about a particular topic. Moreover, the women did not believe they had opinions worth sharing with "educated people." Even while they spoke of their experiences, they often would interrupt themselves, saying apologetically, "I know nothing; I am ignorant." To motivate them to speak, I assured them that their life stories were very important for a young Korean-American woman to hear and learn from and avoided settings and mannerisms that would seem formal, academic, and alien to them. The interviews with the former prostitutes are not intended to offer statistical evidence of any point I make in the study but rather to provide credence to the fact that these women's lives were heavily involved in U.S.-ROK relations at the camptown level and to give voice to people who most Koreans and Americans have never considered as having anything important to say or worth listening to.
U.S.-Korea kijich'on prostitution is part of the U.S. military's chain of overseas camptowns which have thrived on prostitution in Asia (Vietnam, Thailand, Okinawa, and the Philippines, in addition to South Korea). What sets kijich'on prostitution apart is the high level of military dependence--in terms of troops, weapons, treaty commitments, and the amount of U.S. military assistance--that South Korea has exhibited toward the United States since the Korean War. The immediate cause of such dependence is the Communist regime in North Korea, which is still technically at war with the South. The U.S.-Korea alliance is an oft-cited example of patron-client relationships in international politics 21 and as such may help us frame the context in which to pose questions about power disparities between states and their relationship to military prostitution. South Korea is also an example of a nation whose security interests have determined nearly all aspects of its political, economic, and social life from the 1950s to the late 1970s and begs the question of to what extent and at what human and social cost a state's pursuit of its military security objectives can be justified.
The Korean case of foreign-oriented military prostitution is particularly important also because of its historical precedent: the approximately 200,000 Korean women who worked as sex slaves, or "comfort women," to the Japanese military about fifty years ago. The recognition of these parallel cases forces us to track the responsibility of the authorities and powers involved--in this study, the legally sovereign South Korean government and its main military ally and former "savior" from Communist takeover, the United States--while women's bodies and dignities are actively being sacrificed, rather than wait another fifty years to "discover" the abuses of power in the name of military interests.
Most of the comfort women to the Japanese military never lived to shape and hear their own utterances regarding their personal histories and their part in the history of World War II. It is my hope that the voices of living Korean comfort women of the many U.S. camptowns in Korea, who have sexually serviced and presently serve American soldiers, will be heard and their personal histories and integral part in the history of U.S.-Korea relations unveiled before another fifty years bury them more deeply in silence.
Note 1: The Women Outside, directed by J. T. Takagi and Hye Jung Park, 1996 (aired on PBS, July 16, 1996). Back.
Note 2: See chapter 1 on statements made by ROK National Assemblymen regarding U.S.-oriented camptown prostitution. Back.
Note 3: Interview with Mrs. K., Women's Welfare Bureau, Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, Uijô,ngbu City, June 12, 1992. Back.
Note 4: This can be translated as "Western guy" but is a pejorative term akin to calling a person of African descent "nigger" or Asian descent "chink." Back.
Note 5: The Women Outside. Back.
Note 6: ROK Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, Yullak yôsông silt'ae chosa kyôlgwa pogosô, (Report on the State of Prostitutes), 1977, p. 9. Back.
Note 7: The term "sexually transmitted diseases" (STDs) was not in use in the early 1970s. Reference to VD in this book includes gonnorhea and syphilis. Back.
Note 8: Junghyo Ahn, Silver Stallion: A Novel of Korea. Back.
Note 9: Ibid., pp. 88Ð89. Back.
Note 11: Migun kiji pandae chon'guk kongdong taech'aek (National Association Against U.S. Bases), Yangk'i ko hom, (Yankee Go Home) (Seoul: Migun kiji pandae chon'guk kongdong taech'aek, 1990); Pusan minjok minju undong yonhap (Federation of Pusan People's Democracy Movement), Nôhûi ga mullônaya uri ga sanda, (You must withdraw so that we can live) (Seoul: Toso, 1991), part 2, ch. 2; Malchi, (Mal Magazine). Back.
Note 12: Wha Soon Cho, Let the Weak Be Strong: A Woman's Struggle for Justice; Kyung Ae Park, "Women and Development: The Case of South Korea"; Ralph Pettman, "Labor, Gender, and the Balance of Productivity: South Korea and Singapore"; George L. Ogle, South Korea: Dissent Within the Economic Miracle; Seung-Kyung Kim, Class Struggle or Family Struggle: Lives of Women Factory Workers in South Korea., Back.
Note 13: My Sister's Place, Newsletter, July 1991. Back.
Note 15: For example, the Iliad, of Homer. Back.
Note 16: Cynthia Enloe, "Beyond 'Rambo': Women and the Varieties of Militarized Masculinity," p. 85. Back.
Note 17: Enloe, "Bananas, Bases, and Patriarchy," p. 200. Back.
Note 18: Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?, p. 38. Back.
Note 20: The SOFA lays out the terms and conditions of the stationing and operation of the U.S. forces in the ROK. Back.
Note 21: For a characterization of the patron-client relationship, see Michael Handel, Weak States in the International System, pp. 132-33. Back.
Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations
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