Unpacking the Legacy of Japanese Militarized Enslavement on South Korea: From Comfort Women to Modern Day Slavery

• In Event: Exploitation, Gender, and Social Policies

Abstract

From 1910 to 1945, Imperial Japan dominated the Korea peninsula. Korean citizens were enslaved in a variety of ways, in logging, mining, farms, and factories. From the 1930s onwards, tens of thousands of Korean women were sexually enslaved as “comfort women” to service Japanese troops. Although Japanese enslavement ended after Second World War, the trafficking of South Korean women continued under US occupation to service American soldiers at US camptowns. Today, sex trafficking continues in South Korea as well as through forced labor in Korean global supply chains, from electronics to seafood.

In this paper, I explore the linkages in contemporary forms of slavery, past and present regarding the case of South Korea. I assess how much, and in what ways, the narratives of “comfort woman” survivors differ from the accounts of survivors from US camptowns in the 1960s and 1970s, and how much these narratives differ from narratives of victims of contemporary forms of slavery in South Korea. I argue that, although the historic and contextual factors of enslavement are unique, there is an overarching schema in understanding survivorship, and that we stand to learn a great deal from the narratives of “comfort woman” survivors in naming, addressing, and ending contemporary forms of slavery today on the Korean peninsula.

Author

• Monti Narayan Datta, University of Richmond