REGULATING DESIRE, MANAGING THE EMPIRE U.S. Military Prostitution in South Korea, 1945–1970

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SEUNGSOOK MOON

I am a comfort woman catering to foreign soldiers in the 7UP club in Yonp'ungni, Chunae Township, P'aju County, Kyonggi Province. Three years have passed since I came to [YongjugoΓJ. I've already been working as a comfort woman for over two years. I must get out of the bridle of this life.... I've been treated only with contempt because I am a comfort woman serving foreign soldiers, a woman with an inhumane job, but my writing can be of help to other people. Yet I'm not writing my repentance. Although my life may have been inhumane and vicious, I have never committed a crime or a sin. (Pak 1965, 6, 10; my translation)

Annie Pak (or Pak Ok-sun in Korean), whose words are quoted from her autobiography, was conceived by a Korean woman and a white American soldier in January 1946. Her mother was a seventeen-year-old maiden employed in a men's suit factory in Seoul to alter American soldiers' uniforms, and her father was a young private who occasionally visited the factory. Her mother frequently worked until very late at night. On a very gusty winter night, when she came out of the factory to go home, an American military truck stopped in front of her. The soldier, whose face she knew, kindly offered her a ride home, and she thankfully got on the truck. But he took her to a remote place and raped her. Because he was in love with her mother, Annie was told, he took her into his unit and lived with her for five days until she was found by his commanding officer and kicked out. She did not even know the soldier's name. Annie's mother revealed this secret of Annie's birth only after Annie herself had become a camptown sex worker in the mid-1960s (Pak 1965, 253-54).

Left with a Eurasian daughter, Annie's mother began to work in military prostitution to raise her. Clever about multiplying her meager savings, her mother was able to buy a house and leave the work behind. Unfortunately, she then lost her money and houses to charlatans (all Korean men) who lived off her with the promise of marriage, which would have been a ticket to the respectable life for a woman. These vagaries of life evaporated her mother's plan to give Annie a secondary education. After struggling to make ends meet for a few years, her mother finally returned to Yongjugol, a thriving camptown, in the 1960s, where Annie started working in a convenience store patronized by American soldiers. Annie's unusual Euro-American appearance attracted many American soldiers to the store, and at seventeen she fell in love with one of them—a white officer. They lived together like a newlywed couple for several months, and she became pregnant. Yet it turned out that the officer did not intend to marry her, as she had expected, and like numerous soldiers before and after him he left when his service in Korea ended. It is not clear whether Annie was able to leave the camptown for good and whether she is still alive. If she is, she would be living somewhere in Korea as a woman in her sixties.

This chapter traces the emergence and consolidation of U.S. military prostitution during the time span when these two generations of women came to sell sex for a living under conditions beyond their own choice and control. These conditions included the presence of imperial troops, the legacy of the comfort station that naturalized both military and civilian authorities' use of women's sexual labor to manage (male) soldiers, and the mass impoverishment generated by Japanese colonial exploitation and the Korean War. The confluence of these conditions generated the institution of camptown prostitution, which became a naturalized fixture of the American military presence in South Korea. The racialized cultural differences between Korea and the U.S. further amplified the making and spread of the institution. The estimated total of 180,000 camptown sex workers in the 1950s and roughly 10,000 camptown sex workers in the Tongduch'on area alone in the mid-1960s were staggering in light of the annual number of American troops in South Korea, which fluctuated from 85,000 to 50,000 between 1955 and 1970 (Oh et al. 1990,56). In West Germany by comparison (also a country divided by Cold War politics that steadily hosted more than a quarter-million American troops in the 1950s and 1960s), prostitution catering to American soldiers operated on a much smaller scale.

The history of the U.S. military presence in Korea began in September 1945, when the Twenty-Fourth Army Corps, consisting of some 72,000 soldiers and led by Lieutenant-General John R. Hodge, commanding general of the U.S. Armed Forces in Korea (USAFIK), arrived to transfer power from the crumbled Japanese colonial empire. As the agent of the American empire that commanded the global network of military bases, the military developed the unofficial but consistent system of regulated prostitution during its direct rule of Korea (1945-48). The U.S. Army Military Government (USAMG) suppressed unregulated prostitution to control the spread of venereal disease (VD) and, at the same time, regulated prostitution as an expedient means of entertaining and controlling male soldiers. The succeeding Korean government of President Syngman Rhee (1948-60) maintained a similarly...