K-community down under at war with Korean prostitutes

Correct LINK: Procurement of Korean and Taiwanese women.

Gerry, doesn’t your history manual have this too?: The US, not Japan, was the Aggressor.

Yuki Tanaka’s research “Japan’s Comfort Women (Asia’s Transformations)” has a chapter The Colonization of Korea and the Growth of the Prostitution Industry:

One cannot sufficiently explain the establishment and operation of the comfort women system, in particular the sexual exploitation of Korean women in that system, by viewing it from the perspective of military history alone. It becomes comprehensible only when we examine how the trafficking of young women came to be widely practiced in Korea well before the military brothel system was established. This trafficking was a by-product of Japan’s various policies of colonizing the Korean peninsula.

[…]After the annexation, the Government-General of Korea was established as a colonial administrative organ, and the Governor-General was posted to control the entire affairs of Korea. It was stipulated by Imperial Ordinance that the Governor-General was to be selected from among the generals of the Japanese Imperial Army or Navy, and that he was to be directly responsible to the Emperor for administering Korean affairs as well as defending Korea. In other words, with the establishment of the Gevernment-General, Korean society was virtually placed under martial law.

Aided by the military rule of the Government-General, Japan proceeded to transform the Korean economy. The most catastrophic change affecting social conditions in Korea was a new land ownership system, the result of a cadastral survey conducted between March 1910 and November 1918. Due to the loose nature of the traditional landholding system – which required no official registration – the newly introduced and complicated application system resulted in many illiterate peasants and petit-farmers losing their customary tenancy or land ownership rights. In contrast, the Korean upper-class landlords, called yangban, who knew how to get their land registered properly, benefited from the new system, thereby strengthening their contractual property rights. As a result, the commercial value of arable land increased. Large Japanese corporations, such as the Oriental Development Company, were given priority in purchasing the “public land.” It is said that the Oriental Development Company alone came to own more than 20 percent of the arable land in Korea. This drastic change to the landholding system, together with a high tenancy rate (55 percent of arable land), rapidly decreased the number of small, independent farmers and turned them into poverty-stricken peasants. It is estimated that about 80 percent of the Korean population was engaged in agriculture in this period. Therefore, the impact of this change to the landholding system on Korean society was considerable.

From the late 1910s a large proportion of rice produced in Korea was exported to Japan, cutting sharply into the supply of rice available for local consumption. In addition, in the coming years, Korean agriculture was severely hit by bad weather. Almost every year between the late 1920s and the late 1930s Korea experienced weather problems which further impoverished the peasants. Many peasants lost their jobs. For example, in the mid-1930s, the unemployment rate in rural areas during the slack season was as high as 85 percent. In 1932, it was reported that there were more than 20,000 beggars in South Kyongsang Province alone. (Higuchi Yuichi, “Senjika no Chosen Nomin: Rison o Chushin ni” in Kikan Senso Sekinin Kenkyu, No.7, 1995, pp. 55-63; Yun Myeongsuk, “Nicchu Senso-ki ni okeru Chosenjin Guntai Ianfu no Keisei” in Chosen-shi Kenkyukai Rombun-shu, No. 32, 1994, pp.91-93). Excess labor in rural areas created a large influx of young men and women to cities. This trend of people seeking employment in the city brought chronic unemployment to urban areas as well.

Many Koreans went to Japan to work as indentured laborers. They worked under extremely harsh conditions. These Korean workers also suffered racial discrimination by the Japanese. One of the most extreme and tragic cases was the massacre of Koreans by Japanese civilians immediately after the Great Kanto Earthquake, which hit the Tokyo and Yokohama regions on September 1, 1923. Many parts of Tokyo and Yokohama were consumed by fire caused by the earthquake (450,000 houses were destroyed) and more than 100,000 people died. In the midst of the chaos caused by this natural calamity, an utterly groundless rumor about Koreans was spread among Japanese civilians. Koreans were said to have poisoned the drinking water and to be preparing a large-scale political uprising. Many Japanese men, who believed this rumor, armed themselves with swords, bamboo spears and the like, and randomly attacked and killed Koreans. In Kanagawa prefecture, where Yokohama is located, 4,106 Koreans were killed. In Tokyo, the death toll of Koreans was 1,347.

Despite such deep-rooted, intense, and widespread Japanese prejudice against Koreans, the number of Koreans crossing the Korea Strait to Japan in search of work continued to increase. They were driven by the severe depression in their homeland. By 1931, 300,000 Koreans had come to Japan. Seven years later 700,000 Koreans were working throughout Japan. The Government-General of Korea also encouraged Koreans to migrate Manchuria. By 1930, 1.3 million Koreans had moved to Manchuria. Most of them were engaged in rice production for export to Japan. (Ajia Minshu Hotei Jumbi-kai ed., Shashin Zusets: Nippon no Shinryaku (Otsuki Shoten, Tokyo, 1992) pp.80-82. For details of the history of Korean migrant workers in Japan, see Pak Kyonshiku, Chosenjin Kyosei Senko no Kiroku <Mirai-sha, Tokyo, 1965).

In this way, a vast number of peasant-class men worked away from home, commonly for long periods. Young women, too, picked up odd jobs to support their peasant families. Thus, large-scale urban migration took place throughout Korea in the 1920s and 1930s. For example, according to a survey conducted by the tax department of Seoul Municipal Office, the city population increased by 9,488 in one year from the end of 1932. Of this number, 6,690 were Korean women.

However, there were very few jobs in urban areas for uneducated, unskilled rural women. Most worked as low-paid factory workers, waitresses, barmaids, housemaids, nursemaids, and the like. Housemaids and nursemaids were mostly employed by Japanese families living in Korea. (By the early 1930s about half a million Japanese were living in Korea, and most of them were government bureaucrats, policemen, school teachers, factory managers and their families.) It is apparent that many young Korean women turned to prostitution to provide the essential income for their poverty-stricken families to survive. A series of articles entitled “Poverty makes prostitutes,” that appeared in September 1927 in the Korean newspaper Dongah Ilbo, clearly indicates this situation.

It seems that many young women were sold to brothels in return for an advance payment to their families. Many married women also became prostitutes due to financial difficulties that arose while their husbands were working away from home. However, the amount of an advance paid for a Korean woman was far less than that paid for a Japanese woman. For example, in 1933, brothel owners in Inchon made an advance payment of between 200 and 700 yen for a Korean woman for a five-year contract, while between 700 and 25,00 yen was a usual amount paid for a Japanese woman. In other words, destitute Korean families had to sell their daughters to brothels even though the return was small. In short, brothel owners could “employ” several Korean women for the same cost as one Japanese woman. It was quite common also for owners of “restaurants,” “cafes,” and ‘bars,” who operated clandestine prostitution businesses, to pay far less – between 50 and 100 yen in advance – in order to employ Korean women under the pretence of being “waitresses” and “barmaids.” This “pricing mechanism,” which was closely interlinked with chronic poverty caused by colonization, seemed to be one of the main reasons for a rapid increase in the number of Korean prostitutes under Japanese rule.

For more reading at google book: http://tinyurl.com/bpy8nrf

For purchasing: http://www.amazon.com/Japans-Comfort-Women-Asias-Transformations/dp/0415194016