Women involved in prostitution during the 60s and 70s are demanding that the U.S. and South Korean governments own their role. Previously both governments were eager to heap all the blame on the Japanese government. An excerpt:
While the women have made no claims that they were coerced into prostitution by South Korean or American officials during those years, they accuse successive Korean governments of hypocrisy in calling for reparations from Japan while refusing to take a hard look at South Korea's own history."Our government was one big pimp for the U.S. military," one of the women, Kim Ae-ran, 58, said in a recent interview.
Scholars on the issue say that the South Korean government was motivated in part by fears that the American military would leave, and that it wanted to do whatever it could to prevent that.
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.
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Dude, what's with using the "not for public use" picture in public? Google more.
Oh! Oh, I signed in for the first time after a year of lurking to comment on this. I worked in SK for a while, and one of the things that comes up while you're working there is all these Eastern European women working as prostitutes over there. Before I even went I read a Lonely Planet guidebook warning women travellers that "Are you Russian" is code for "Are you a prostitute?"-- and they said not to get offended by it (you will see why this is soooo horrible). Anyways, I didn't think much of it at the time, just, hey, here's some prostitutes from Eatern Europe. And I knew there were some Korean Yakuza there, and I also knew that sex slavery is one of the businesses Yakuza partake it, but I didn't connect it all up.
So fast forward to me doing some aid work in Cambodia and reading this book The Natashas where I learned how mistaken I was about these women. They are, to a woman, sex slaves. They are not willing prostitutes. And this connects to the S.K. prostitution thing like this: yes, the S. Korean government provided S. Korean women to U.S. troops when they needed their help, and there's also the fact that at the time S.K. prostitutes were in vogue, the economy was terrible. Well, the S.K. economy got pulled up by its bootstraps, in large part due to military contracts with the U.S. but also because of the Hyundai group etc. And then there stopped being so many S.K. prostitutes willing to provide their services for the U.S. forces. So when you have a situation like this of course the more criminal elements see dollar signs and head for sex slave donor countries, and a huge sex slave pipeline opened in S.K. And S.K., being the corrupt country it is (look up the collapse of the Songpoon mall-- the company I worked for paid of building and tax inspectors yearly), actually has a fake VISA to allow these women into the country. It's kind of like a big inside joke for the visa workers, since they don't give a shit about these Eastern European women that have been kidnapped for the purposes of being raped by the U.S. military-- which was actually very complicit in opening up this pipeline, it was called the leisure club or something.
My point is, so yes the Korean government did pimp these women out, but HOLY SHIT they are currently one of the worst receiver countries (according to The Natashas), and they're doing way worse than pimping women out RIGHT NOW. I will be going back to S.K. to work pretty soon, and plan to find a group interesting in abolishing this horrible practice, but if anyone else has more info I'd love to hear it.
That's interesting to hear, although it makes sense... I always hear about how Japan is to blame for pretty much everything by word of mouth. Of course, I have no hard facts... I just hear the residual resentment filtered through the generations of the Chinese and Korean families who suffered. It's odd how Japanese culture is now idolized by young people across the globe when older members of the same families used to refuse to even buy Japanese consumer products.
On the statistican in South Korea the quantity of women in country management personnel has grown for 20 years in 6 times and has reached 7,1 % from number of the workers occupied in management and the organisation of manufacture. In general, in the Asian countries most of all women on supervising posts.
Nevertheless, we should not relax - more many work is necessary for making, and I plan to continue this work with a command of women with which I have visited South Korea, and to help them to achieve new successes.