Category: Prostitution

Is anyone surprised this issue hasn’t been corrected yet?:

Korean sailors’ sexual exploitation of teenage girls in Kiribati, a small island country in the Pacific Ocean, is continuing despite major international reports about the sex trade a few years ago, the National Youth Commission said yesterday.

Three girls even gave birth to babies of Korean sailors because the men refused to use condoms, it said.

The commission interviewed 24 women who had sex with Korean sailors during an investigation in Kiribati last December. One-third of them were under 19, the legal age of consent in Korea, and one girl was 14 years old.

As most of such girls live in extreme poverty, they fall into commercial sex for money, it said.

In Kiribati, young sex workers associated with foreign fishing vessels are called “te korekorea,” referring to the Korean sailors to whom the girls provide most of their services.

The commission estimated about 40 to 50 women were involved with Korean sailors last year and the age that they entered the business was getting younger.

You have to be one jacked up person to want to have sex with a 14 year old. 

What is interesting is that Kiribati’s main island is the island of Tarawa.  Tarawa during World War II was the site of the US military’s second offensive against the Imperial Japanese military.  After the Battle of Guadalcanal the US Marines launched an attack to secure the island of Tarawa.  Over 1,000 Marines died securing the island.  Over 4,700 Japanese and Koreans died defending the island.  Even more interesting is that only 17 Japanese and 129 Koreans survived the battle. 

From the Chosun:

Police made clear their zero tolerance in enforcing Korea’s new anti-prostitution laws in the first bust of an establishment offering manual sexual favors.

The Seoul Central District Public Prosecutors’ Office on Wednesday booked the owner of a sports massage parlor in Dogok-dong in Seoul’s Gangnam-gu district for violating the Special Law on Prostitution. The owner, identified as Chung, employed some 20 women offering manual relief, colloquially known as hand jobs, to customers at W60,000.

This is the first time police have charged someone for involvement in such acts since the Special Law on Prostitution came into force on Sept. 23.

What’s next for this great prostitution crackdown? The barber shops?

This is one of these only in Korea stories, from the LA Times:

The law giving only the legally blind the right to become registered masseurs was introduced under Japanese occupation in 1913 and reaffirmed by South Korea 50 years later, a way for the state to give the visually impaired a chance to earn a living in a culture prone to ostracizing the disabled.

But that aim has now collided with South Korea’s constitutional guarantees against discrimination. Masseurs who are not blind and want to offer sports therapy or give facial and foot massages have long complained that the law is biased.

And they have decided to fight.

“Why is our business illegal in Korea when in all other countries around the world it’s perfectly legal?” asks Lee Dong-yup, president of the Korea Meridians Assn., which lobbies for about 300,000 masseurs who are not legally licensed — although many are working anyway, openly and without being harassed by police or inspectors.

Basically what is going on here is that the non-blind masseurs want to legally practice because customers would rather prefer to get a massage from hot and young Korean girl among other benefits and not a 63 year old blind ajumma.

UPDATE: Robert has more sob story translations from the original Donga article.

From the Donga:

Albuquerque is a city of 500,000, which is built in the middle of a vast wilderness in New Mexico. The Detention and Correction Center that I visited on September 18 was in the middle of its downtown area unlike my imagination. However, security and guard were heavy, just like other correctional facilities. On the fourth floor of the building, seemingly the tallest one in the city, were Korean women in custody.

“With my hands tied and shackled, I was taken here by flight for 23 hours. They didn’t care even when I said I had a hygienic emergency.”

Korean women who came out to a hall after every 3-4 were locked up in a room, poured out complaints and pleas. There were so many complaints that Kwon Tae-myun, consulate general in Washington D.C. couldn’t even answer.

“Out of the blue, policemen with guns raided us and we were dragged out without wearing proper clothes. We were locked up in some kind of a hotel for a week and were sent here. We couldn’t bring anything. They took our money.”

I wonder if they were water boarded? Maybe Congress can open an investigation and create the Prostitute’s Bill of Rights.

Here is the scariest part of the article:

Mrs. A, 35, took a flight to Mexico eight months ago after listening to one of her acquaintances. She was guided to Tijuana, Mexico which borders San Diego in California and after staying at a tourist home for a couple of days, she crossed the border hidden in a car with a back seat removed. It cost her $10,000 to cross the border. There were a lot of ethnic Korean women who came from Yongbyon, China at the tourist home.

If a Korean prostitute can get across the border that easily who else is coming across as well?

One man in South Korea thinks more families in Area 1 would curve the prostitution in Area 1:

Encouraging more military families to follow soldier spouses and parents to Area I would cut vice around U.S. Army bases here, says a missionary who works with soldiers in Dongducheon.

In recent years the Army has taken steps to curb problems in bar districts outside U.S. bases, including joint patrols of U.S. military and Korean National Police and declaring certain clubs off-limits.

But American missionary Bill Meyers, director of Shalom House in Dongducheon, says he believes that encouraging soldiers’ families to live near the bases would go a long way toward cleaning up neighborhoods.

“The spouses and children who are here all come at their own expense under very difficult circumstances,” Meyers said. “If more families were allowed here there would be less problems. When you have more families around you have less drinking, less prostitution, less pornography and less gambling. It would be a more wholesome community.”

I don’t know about a “wholesome community”, but more families would definitely reduce the amount of shady activity in the ville because many of the married soldiers would not be hanging out in the ville with their families living with them in Korea. However, I think the other areas in Korea where families are allowed proves that families alone will not end the prostitution problem in Korea. USFK can try all they want but the only ones that can really end prostitution in Korea are the Koreans themselves.

Apparently the crackdown on prostitution in Korea has created a surge of sex tourism in Japan.

South Korean men are pouring into Japan to use the country’s imaginative sex businesses, literally creating cultural friction, but that by no means suggests there’s any trouble, says Shukan Post (6/3). Korean men having a proclivity for Japanese sex workers is nothing new.

Kim Jong Nam, Kim Jong Il’s son and once heir apparent, revealed when he was nabbed in Tokyo in 2001 that he frequented high class brothels in Tokyo’s Yoshiwara soapland district.

But now growing numbers of average Korean businessmen are partaking in the pleasures of the flesh like never before.

And I thought Kim Jong Nam only wanted to see Disneyland. I wonder if Bae Yung Joon made stopped by one of these soap lands during his last tour of the country?

Here is something that will make all Koreans proud:

Bubble babes, the women working the soaplands, are pleased to fire up the men from the Land of the Morning Calm.

“I’ve serviced about five Korean guys so far. They’re all very gentlemanly at first. They’ve all had military training, too, so they’re fit, really go it hard and want it time and time again. I start feeling it for real and am exhausted by the end of a session,” one worker says. “I suppose the biggest impression left on me is that all the time we’re going at it, they keep asking me in broken Japanese, ‘Am I better than a Japanese guy or what?'”

This is probably going to please many Koreans when reading this but keep in mind that this only further validates the point I made in my prior posting about the Korean inferiority complex. As long as Koreans feel like they have to compare themselves to Japan even when having sex with a prostitute, the country will never fully recover from the Japanese colonization. Koreans need to learn to just be comfortable with who they are.

Hat Tip to the Japundit.