International Review of Law and Economics 65 (2021) 105971

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International Review of Law and Economics

Contracting for sex in the Paciﬁc War
J. Mark Ramseyer 1
Harvard University, United Statesa r t i c l e

i n f oArticle history:
Received 29 August 2020
Received in revised form 28 October 2020
Accepted 28 November 2020
Available online 1 December 2020
Keywords:
Prostitution
Indentured servitudea b s t r a c t
The protracted political dispute between South Korea and Japan over the wartime brothels called c̈omfort
stationsöbscures the contractual dynamics involved. These dynamics reﬂected the straightforward logicof the c̈redible commitmentss̈o basic to elementary game theory. The brothel owners and potential prostitutes faced a problem: the brothel needed credibly to commit to a contractual structure (i) generous
enough to offset the dangers and reputational damage to the prostitute that the job entailed, while(ii) giving the prostitute an incentive to exert effort while working at a harsh job in an unobservable
environment.
Realizing that the brothel owners had an incentive to exaggerate their future earnings, the womendemanded a large portion of their pay upfront. Realizing that they were headed to the war zone, they
demanded a relatively short maximum term. And realizing that the women had an incentive to shirk, thebrothel owners demanded a contractual structure that gave women incentives to work hard. To satisfy
these superﬁcially contradictory demands, the women and brothels concluded indenture contracts that
coupled (i) a large advance with one- or two-year maximum terms, with (ii) an ability for the women toleave early if they generated sufﬁcient revenue.
© 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
As the Japanese army advanced and retreated across East Asia in
the 1930s and 40 s, it encouraged private entrepreneurs to establish semi-ofﬁcial brothels next to its bases. Venereal disease had
wreaked havoc on its Siberian expedition in 1918, and it neededthat risk under control. From the cooperating brothel owners, itdemanded that the prostitutes undergo regular medical examinations. In exchange, it promised to forbid its men from patronizing
brothels anywhere else.
To staff their brothels, the cooperating entrepreneurs hired
women primarily from Japan and Korea. All else equal, the soldiers
preferred Japanese women. Among the non-Japanese staff, they
preferred the Koreans. Korea was part of the Japanese nation, afterall (Japan had annexed the peninsula in 1910), and most Korean
women spoke at least some Japanese. The army called the coop-

E-mail address: ramseyer@law.harvard.edu
Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, Harvard University. I gratefully
acknowledge the generous and helpful comments and suggestions of Elizabeth
Berry, Yoshitaka Fukui, Il-Young Jung, Mitsuhiko Kimura, Yoshiro Miwa, Jason
Morgan, Minoru Nakazato, Gregory Noble, Geoffrey Ramseyer, Jennifer Ramseyer,
Frances Rosenbluth, Richard Samuels, Henry Smith, Frank Upham, and the referees
and editors of this journal.
1

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.irle.2020.105971
0144-8188/© 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

¨
erating brothels c̈omfort stations(ianjo).
It called the prostitutes¨
c̈omfort women(ianfu).
Consider the contracting problem. To staff these brothels,
entrepreneurs needed to recruit young women. They obviously
needed to promise the women extremely high pay. Even in thebest of circumstances, prostitution is harsh and dangerous workand exacts a major reputational penalty. Women will take the job
only if they expect to earn income both high enough to offset thesecosts, and signiﬁcantly higher than their next-best alternative.
For work in distant wartime locations, the entrepreneurs needed
to promise pay substantially higher even than in the Tokyo or Seoul
brothels. To the standard travails of prostitution, the comfort stations added the risk of warfare. They added the cost of living in
a foreign environment. The women would be away from friends,
allies, people to whom they could turn for help should the brothel
try to cheat them. And they raised the difﬁculty of absconding
should the brothel try to cheat, and the price of returning home
if they stayed their term and retired at the end.
Although they needed to promise the women high pay, theentrepreneurs could not just offer a high monthly wage. They
were hiring women to perform unpleasant work in impossible-tomonitor surroundings. If they promised a ﬁxed monthly wage, theygave each woman an incentive to be sufﬁciently unpleasant that noone asked for her at the front desk. Necessarily, they needed a wage
contract that rewarded effort.

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International Review of Law and Economics 65 (2021) 105971

Somehow, the entrepreneurs needed to make their promisesof high pay from this incentive-based wage contract credible. To
entice a woman to take this contract, an entrepreneur needed toconvince her that she would earn high wages. Yet she knew that
he had every incentive to exaggerate her potential earnings, andhe knew that she knew. Some women would have doubted theirown capacity to generate high earnings. In some jobs, a woman
might have experimented for a short period to learn how much
revenue she could earn. Given the reputational hit she took simply
for entering the occupation, she could not do that here.
To recruit women to brothels on the military front, theentrepreneurs and women faced contractual problems harder byorders of magnitude. Most obviously, the women faced all the dangers of war – ﬁghting, bombing, and rampant disease. The women
also faced far more serious risks of brothel non-performance.
Should a brothel owner in Tokyo try to cheat on the contract, aprostitute could complain to the police. They would not all be sympathetic, but some would. She could sue the brothel owner in court
for nonperformance. Some did exactly that, and won. She could
walk out of the brothel, and disappear into the anonymity of theTokyo metropolis. In a distant foreign country, she faced the riskthat she might not be able to do any of this.
The entrepreneurs and the women addressed these problems
with a multi-year indenture agreement that bundled an up-front
advance, additional cash compensation, a maximum term, andthe right to quit early if a woman generated enough revenue. In
the article that follows, I detail the economic logic to these contracts. I compare the sexual service contracts the entrepreneurs andwomen negotiated (i) for the comfort stations, with the contracts
they negotiated (ii) for domestic Japanese brothels, (iii) for domestic Korean brothels, and (iv) for the non-comfort-station war-timebrothels across Japanese-governed East Asia.
I begin by outlining the contracts used in domestic Japanesebrothels (Sec. 2.2). I compare them to the contracts used in Korea,
and to the contracts used in the unofﬁcial (non-comfort-station)
brothels elsewhere within the Japanese empire (Secs. 2.3, 2.4).
Finally, I turn to the contracts used by the comfort stations themselves (Sec. 3).

nities because they believed prostitution offered them a better
outcome. Recruiters could lie. Brothels owners could cheat. Parents could abuse their children and steal the advance payment thatthe women earned. But the contracts suggest that the women knewthat recruiters could lie, knew that brothel owners could cheat, anddid not quietly defer to abusive parents.
2.2. Japan
1. Licensed prostitutes. – (a) The contracts as stated. Prostitution had been a licensed industry in pre-war Japan (see generally
Ramseyer, 1991). In 1924, 50,100 licensed prostitutes (shogi)
worked out of 11,500 licensed brothels in Japan (Fukumi 1928:
50–56, 178; Kusama, 1930: 14–26). Most commonly, the licensed
prostitutes worked under multi-year indenture contracts.2(a) The brothel paid the woman (or her parents) a given amountupfront, and in exchange she agreed to work for the shorterof (i) the time it took her to pay off the loan or (ii) the statedcontractual term(b) The mean upfront amount in the mid-1920s ranged from about1000 to 1200 yen. The brothel did not charge interest.
(c) The most common (70–80 percent of the contracts) term was
six years.
(d) Under the typical contract, the brothel took the ﬁrst 2/3 to 3/4 ofthe revenue a prostitute generated. It applied 60 percent of theremainder toward the loan repayment, and let the prostitutekeep the rest.
I know of no source detailing how often the upfront payment
went to the woman herself, how often it went to her parents who
kept it on her behalf, and how often it went to abusive parents who
kept it for themselves. Note, however, that prostitutes were notprisoners. In cities like Tokyo, they could easily leave their brothels and disappear into the anonymous urban environment. If theydid, the brothel would then sue their parents on the cash advance(a prostitute’s father typically signed the contract as guarantor).
That this only happened occasionally suggests (obviously does notprove) that most prostitutes probably chose the job themselves;
they probably did so because – in their minds – it made the best ofa bad situation.
(b) The contracts as applied. In practice, the prostitutes repaid
their loans in about three years and quit. Surely, historians sometimes insist, the brothels must have manipulated the charges forfood and clothing to keep prostitutes mired in perpetual debt. At
least on a large scale, however, they did not do this. Probably,
the brothels – established institutions with a large capital investment – realized that cheating on their initial contract would raise
their future recruitment costs. Not only did the brothels speciﬁcallypromise a woman she could quit debt-free at the end of six years
regardless of the revenue she generated, they generally kept theirpromise.
If brothels manipulated charges or otherwise cheated on theirterms to keep prostitutes locked in debt, the number of licensed
prostitutes should have stayed reasonably constant at least up to
age 30. The minimum age for licensed prostitutes was 18. In 1925,
there were 737 licensed Tokyo prostitutes aged 21, and 632 aged
22. There were only 515 aged 24, however, 423 age 25, and 254 age
27 (Fukumi, 1928: 58–59).
Similarly, if brothels were keeping prostitutes locked in d̈ebt
slavery,ẗhe number of years in the industry should have stayed
constant beyond six. Yet of 42,400 licensed prostitutes surveyed,

2. Prostitution in Prewar Japan and Korea
2.1. Introduction
The comfort stations operated as the overseas military analogue
to the private brothels in Japan and Korea. Whether in Japan or in
Korea, brothels hired, and women looked for work. The work at
stake in these transactions involved sexual services, but the economic logic to the arrangements that the two parties – brotheland prostitute – negotiated reﬂected the resources and alternative opportunities that both sides understood each other to hold.
Recruiters and brothels could lie, but prostitutes could shirk or takethe money and run. The women understood that the recruiters andbrothels could lie, and understood too that they could shirk or disappear. The brothels could replace them with other women, but
the women could ﬁnd other work too, however low-paying. Yes
indeed, parents did sometimes sell their daughters and brothels did
sometimes trap women or keep them virtually imprisoned. But theeconomic logic (detailed below) to the contractual arrangements
reﬂects the fact that brothels could not – and did not – trap or
imprison all or even most of the women.
The contracts themselves reﬂect the intelligence and resourcefulness of the women involved. They were people with few
attractive alternative economic opportunities, but they had some– and the terms of the contracts suggest they knew they had
some. They chose prostitution over those alternative opportu-

2
For the details of these contracts, see Fukumi (1928: 70, 97-99, 115-16, 220),
Kusama 1930: 206, 211, 283), Okubo (1906), Ito (1931: 229), Chuo (1926: 412-15).

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International Review of Law and Economics 65 (2021) 105971

38 percent were in their second or third year, 25 percent were in
their fourth or ﬁfth, and only 7 percent were in their sixth or seventh (Ito, 1931: 208–11; Kusama, 1930: 281). On a workforce ofabout 50,000 licensed prostitutes, 18,800 women registered as new
licensed prostitutes in 1922 and 18,300 de-registered (Yamamoto,
1983: 388; Ito, 1931: 211–13). Consistent with a general tenureof about three years, in other words, one third of the work force
replaced itself every year (Keishi, 1933: 96–98; Kusama, 1930:
227–28).
(c) An example. Consider some simple calculations (Keishi, 1933:
96–98; Kusama, 1930: 227–28). In 1925, customers made 3.74 million visits to the 4,159 licensed prostitutes in Tokyo. Aside frompayments for food and drink, they spent 11.1 million yen. Of thisamount, prostitutes kept 31 percent, or 3.4 million yen – 655 yen
per prostitute. Under the standard arrangement, the prostitutewould have applied 60 percent of this amount (393 yen) toward
the repayment of her loan, and kept the rest (262 yen). She would
have repaid her initial loan of 1200 yen in about 3 years. The average adult factory wage (both sexes; room and board not provided)in 1925 was 1.75 yen per day, and in 1935 was 1.88 yen per day(Shakai, 1936: 53; Ohsato, 1966: 68). To earn their income, theprostitutes in 1924 served a mean 2.54 customers per night (Keishi,
1933: 96; Kusama, 1930: 220–21; Uemura, 1929: 492–501). They
worked about 28 nights per month (Keishi, 1933: 96–98).
2. The contractual logic. – (a) Credible commitments. This indenture contract in the licensed sector reﬂected the straightforward¨
game theoretic logic of c̈redible commitments(Ramseyer,1991).
Young women understood that prostitution was dangerous andharsh, and imposed a large upfront hit to their reputations. What ismore, they understood that they incurred that reputational hit even
if they quit after a very short period. Recruiters promised them very
high wages, but they understood that recruiters had every incentive to exaggerate. Wholly apart from the recruiters’ incentives to
exaggerate, some women would simply have doubted their own
ability to generate high revenue levels.
As a result, before a young woman agreed to work at a brothel
she needed credible assurance that she would earn wages highenough to compensate her for the negative characteristics associated with the job. Were there no reputational hit to entering theindustry, she could try the job for a few months to see how much she
could earn. Given that she incurred the reputational cost even froma short stint, however, she could not readily verify the recruiters’
claims.
The women forced recruiters to overcome this problem ofpromissory credibility by paying each prostitute a large fraction ofher earnings upfront, and capping the number of years she would
have to work. If the brothel paid her 1000 yen in advance and set
the maximum term to six years, she knew the minimum she would
earn. She also knew that if she repaid it earlier (as most prostitutes
did), she would earn even higher effective monthly wages.
In turn, the brothel needed a way to create an incentive forits prostitutes to please their customers. The women performed
harsh work in impossible-to-monitor environments. If brothels
paid them a ﬁxed wage (like an initial 1000-yen payment on aﬁxed six-year term), they had little incentive to try to please theircustomers. If a prostitute were sufﬁciently unpleasant that guests
seldom requested her by name, so much the better.
By coupling a maximum six-year term with the ability to quit
early, the brothel gave a prostitute an incentive to please her customers. The more customers requested her, the more revenue she
generated. The more she generated, the sooner she could quit.
(b) Loans. Obviously, through these contracts the brothel
extended to the woman or her parents a loan. If she or her parents needed that cash advance, the employment contract offeredit. Young European men in the 19th century needed cash to pay
their passage to North America; redemptioner contracts (a varia-

tion on indentures) offered that advance. So too here: the woman’s
promise to work facilitated a credit extension.
Two aspects of this labor market, however, suggest that thedemand for a loans does not explain the use of these contracts inthe sexual services market. First, very few other labor contracts
included a loan with the contract. Suppose parents needed a cash
advance. If a daughter could obtain a cash loan from a brothel, a
son could have obtained a cash loan from a factory. Yet sons anddaughters rarely took large cash advances upon signing employment contracts. Although some other employers did sometimes
lend money to new hires, they did so only haphazardly, and only
for relatively small amounts.
Second, the licensed brothels paid the cash advance to all newhires. Although some prospective prostitutes and some parents
would have wanted 1200-yen cash loans, many would not. The
money did not come free. The brothels did not charge a stated interest, but they obviously discounted the woman’s earnings to present
value. Were the brothels paying the large cash advances only inresponse to a demand in the credit market, they would have paid
the indentures to some of their hires and not paid to others. The
fact that they coupled the massive cash advances with all of theirlabor contracts suggests that some other contractual dynamic wasat play.
3. Unlicensed prostitutes. – Below the licensed prostitutes in thissexual services market worked the independent, unlicensed prostitutes. Given the choice between the two sectors, most prostitutes
preferred the licensed. From 1920 to 1927, of all the women who
applied for work as licensed prostitutes in Tokyo, only 62 percent
obtained jobs (Chuo, 1926: 381–82; Kusama 1930: 27–30, 36). Far
from being job that no one wanted, positions in the licensed brothels were jobs with half again as many applicants as the brothels
wanted to hire. Many of the unlicensed prostitutes were those
women whom the licensed brothels had refused to hire (Kusama,
1930: 37). Historical records contain no reliable censuses of theunlicensed workers, but otherwise trustworthy observers put their
number at about 50,000 in the mid-1920s (Fukumi 1928: 26–28,
32, 50–56, 178).
Because the unlicensed prostitutes nominally violated the law,they lacked the option of working for an established brothel. Brothels developed reputations. Given that illegal unlicensed prostitutes
could not work for a brothel with a reputation for high quality service, the unlicensed prostitutes earned less money. Among female
workers from the northern Akita prefecture in 1934, licensed prostitutes earned room & board plus 884 yen per year. Bar maids(shakufu; the general euphemism in this literature for unlicensed
prostitutes) made 518 yen, waitresses made 210 yen, and other
women workers made 130 yen (Shakai, 1935: 160–61).
The unlicensed sector also presented clients with higher risks.
By law, licensed prostitutes underwent weekly medical examinations for venereal disease, and infected women could not return towork until they recovered. In 1932, 3.2 percent of licensed prostitutes in Tokyo had venereal or other infectious disease. The same
study found a 9.7 percent rate among unlicensed prostitutes. Other
studies conﬁrm a 1–3 percent infection rate among licensed prostitutes, but ﬁnd rates much higher than 10 percent among theunlicensed.3
4. Karayuki. – As Japanese businessmen moved abroad forwork, young women followed. There in the foreign countries, thewomen worked as prostitutes for the Japanese clientele. K̈arayuki¨san,J̈apanese called them: ẅomen heading abroad(Nihon,
1920).
Given the usual preference among expatriate Japanese men forJapanese women, they earned substantially higher wages than their3
Keishi (1933: 143–44), Uemura (1918), Kusama (1930: 288, 291), Fukumi (1928:
93, 168-69), Chuo (1926: 433-35).

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International Review of Law and Economics 65 (2021) 105971

local competitors. Given the cost of relocating abroad, they earned
generally higher wages than they could earn within Japan (Park,
2014: 451).
The expatriate prostitutes tended to come from two discrete
communities on or near the southern island of Kyushu: Shimabara
and Amakusa. That most of them came from a few small communities is crucial: it makes implausible any notion that they had been
tricked by duplicitous recruiters. Trickery works when the target
audience does not know what is at stake. When young women (orgirls) from small, closed communities leave for several years andthen return, they report what happened. Word travels, and othersin the community learn what the trip entails.
Author Tomoko Yamazaki (1972) traveled to Amakusa to
explore this history. There, she befriended an elderly emigrant
prostitute named Osaki. Osaki had indeed worked many years
abroad, but hers was not a story either of paternal oppression orof sexual slavery. Osaki had been born in a small village to a family
who already had a boy and a girl. A few years after her birth, herfather died. Her mother then found a new lover. As he had no interest in her very small children, she abandoned them and married
him anyway. The three children survived together in a tiny shack,and scrapped together what they could to eat. Other women in thecommunity had worked as prostitutes abroad, and had returned
with substantial sums of money. In time, her older sister left towork abroad as a prostitute herself.
When Osaki turned ten, a recruiter stopped by and offered her
300 yen upfront if she would agree to go abroad. The recruiter did
not try to trick her; even at age 10, she knew what the job entailed.
She discussed it with her brother, and decided to take the work to
help him establish himself in farming. She travelled to Malaysia,
and worked as a maid for three years. She was happy, she recalled.
Her family fed her white rice and ﬁsh every day, which was morethan the three abandoned children had been able to scavenge inAmakusa.
At age 13, she began working for the family as a prostitute.
Because of the cost of passage and three years of room and board,
she now owed 2000 yen. Under the new terms, customers paid 2
yen for a short stay and 10 yen for an overnight visit. The brothel
owner kept half the amount, and provided room and board. Outof the remaining half, she paid down her outstanding balance andbought cosmetics and clothing. If she worked hard, she found that
she could repay about 100 yen a month.
Before Osaki had ﬁnished repaying her loan, her owner died andshe found herself transferred to a brothel in Singapore. She disliked her new owner, so one day she and some of the others went
down to the harbor and bought a ticket back to Malaysia. The point
is important: even overseas, women who disliked their jobs at abrothel could – and did – simply disappear.
Osaki found a new brothel. She liked the couple who owned
it (and they negotiated her release from the earlier brothel), andin time took to calling the wife m̈other.T̈here she stayed until an
expatriate Britisher made her his mistress. Later in life, she returned
to her home in Amakusa.

1,789 Japanese licensed prostitutes worked in Korea but only 1,262
Koreans. The Japanese prostitutes entertained 450,300 guests,
where the Koreans entertained 110,700 (252 guests per year for
the Japanese prostitute, 88 for the Korean). By 1935 the number ofJapanese licensed prostitutes had fallen to 1,778 but the numberof Koreans still had risen only to 1,330 (Kim and Kim 2018: 18, 21;
Fujinaga, 2004).
Plenty of Korean women worked as prostitutes, but they simply
did not work within the licensing structure. In 1935 Korea, government records report that 414 Japanese women worked as bar
maids and 4,320 as cabaret workers (both euphemisms for unlicensed prostitutes). Of Korean women, 1,290 worked as barmaids
and 6,553 as cabaret workers.4
2. The contracts. – (a) Prices. To recruit their licensed prostitutes, Korean brothels used indenture contracts much like thosein Japan. Prices, however, reﬂected the lower standard of living in
Korea. Over the economy as a whole, from 1910 to 1940 the ratioof Japanese to Korean wages varied from about 2.5 to 1.5. Korean
men in the 1930s earned about 1–2 yen per day (Odaka 1975: 150,
153).
Within this Korean market, Japanese prostitutes charged morethan Korean prostitutes. Japanese customers were generally
wealthier than Korean customers, after all, and Japanese customers
tended to prefer Japanese women. By one account, in 1926 Korean
prostitutes charged 3 yen for an assignation; Japanese prostitutes
in Korea charged 6–7 yen. Customers spent an average 3.9 yen on
a visit to a Korean licensed prostitute; they spent an average of 8
yen on a visit to a Japanese licensed prostitute in Korea (Kim andKim 2018: 26, 89, 96; Nihon yuran, 1932: 461). In one (apparently
poorer) Korean community in 1929, Japanese licensed prostitutes
generated annual revenues of 1,052 yen; Korean licensed prostitutes generated 361 yen (Nihon, 1994).
The higher Japanese revenues resulted in higher upfront cash
payments to the Japanese prostitutes working in Korea than to
the Korean prostitutes. One source (see Kim and Kim, 2018:96) described Korean licensed prostitutes receiving advances of
250–300 yen (and occasionally 400–500 yen) on three year contracts; Japanese licensed prostitutes received 1,000–3,000 yen(note the higher amounts than in Japan). Another source calculated the average upfront payment to Korean licensed prostitutes
at 420 yen, while the Japanese licensed prostitute received 1,730
yen (Nihon, 1994: 63).
(b) Contractual term. Consistent with the experience of prostitutes in Japan quitting within six years, Korean licensed prostitutes
left the industry by their mid-20s. In one study, 61 percent of Koreanlicensed prostitutes were 20–25 years old; only 16 percent wereover 25 (Kim and Kim, 2018: 97; see Ito, 1931: 172-94). In another,
680 of the 1,101 licensed prostitutes in the Seoul area were age
20–24, but only 273 were 25−29. Of that group of 1,101, 294 werein their ﬁfth year of service; 65 were in their sixth, and 17 in theirseventh. On the base population of 1,101, 317 entered in 1924, and407 quit (Michiya, 1928).
2. Korean prostitution abroad. – Like the Japanese karayuki,
young Korean women too travelled abroad. Crucially, Korean
women went abroad to work as prostitutes long before several
Shanghai brothels became the ﬁrst licensed “comfort stations” in
1932. The comfort stations, in other words, did not begin the practice of Korean young women working abroad as prostitutes. The
young women had been working abroad as prostitutes for decades
before.
Already by the 1920s, Korean women were travelling to
Manchuria to work as prostitutes (Fujinaga, 1998). In 1929, 196

2.3. Prostitution in Korea
1. The phenomenon. – As Japanese emigrants began to move to
Korea, they established in their communities structures akin to
the licensed brothels at home. Japan formally annexed Korea in
1910, and the new government imposed uniform licensing rules
for brothels across all Korea in 1916. It set the minimum age forprostitution at 17 (not 18 as on the Japanese islands), and required
regular medical examinations (Fujinaga, 1998, 2004; Kim and Kim
2018: 18, 21).
Although both Koreans and Japanese could use the new licensing system, the Japanese did so more readily. By 1929, for example,

44, Chosen (1906-42), Nihongun (2020).

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International Review of Law and Economics 65 (2021) 105971

Korean women worked in Taiwan as licensed or unlicensed prostitutes (Fujinaga, 2001; Taiwan, 1932), and in 1924 67 Korean women
worked in Dailin (Fujinaga, 2000: 219). Presumably, some served aJapanese clientele, some served a Korean clientele, and some serveda Chinese clientele.
And long after those ﬁrst comfort stations, Korean women continued to travel abroad to work as unlicensed prostitutes as well
– again, for a wide variety of customers. In 1937, for example,
the Tianjin immigrants association reported 81 unlicensed prostitutes from Korea. During one month in 1938, 90 Korean women
petitioned the (Japanese-controlled) Korean government for permission to travel to the Chinese city of Jinan to work as unlicensed
prostitutes (Kitashina, 1938). And while 12 Korean women worked
in comfort stations in Shanghai in 1940, 527 worked as unlicensed
prostitutes.5

2. Korea. – Korea had a problem distinct from any in Japan. It hada large corps of professional labor recruiters, and those recruiters
had a history of deceptive tactics. In 1935, Korean police records
counted 247 Japanese and 2,720 Korean recruiters. To be sure,these men and women (and they included both men and women)
recruited workers for factories as well as brothels (Nihon, 1994:
51; Yamashita, 2006: 675). But throughout the prewar decades,
newspapers reported recruiter fraud related to the sex industry.
Back in 1918, the Japanese language daily in Seoul (Keijo nippo,
1918; Senda, 1973: 89) complained of ä massive increase in thenumber of cases where a delinquent entices a woman to Seoul and,after playing all sorts of tricks on her, sells her off to one of the ’dubious restaurants.’Ïn the late 1930s, Korean newspapers reported aring of 11 recruiters who attracted over 50 young women into prostitution (Toa, 1937). They reported one astonishingly skillful couple
who had deceived over 100. Apparently, the couple promised parents that they would ﬁnd a job for their daughters in Seoul factories,
paid the parents 10 or 20 yen, and then forwarded the daughters tooverseas brothels for 100 to 1,300 yen each (Toa, 1939; Yamashita,
2006: 675).
Note, however, what this problem was not. It was not thatthe government – either the Korean or the Japanese government– forced women into prostitution. It was not that the Japanesearmy worked with fraudulent recruiters. It was not even that
recruiters focused on the army’s comfort stations. Instead, the problem involved domestic Korean recruiters who had been tricking
young women into working at brothels for decades.

2.4. Recruitment in Japan and Korea
1. Japan. – Many reformers sought to ban prostitution in prewar
Japan, but virtually none complained about recruiters abducting
young women into brothels. Young women from poor communities
routinely left town to work as prostitutes, but they rarely claimed
that any recruiter or brothel had forced them to take the job. Neither
did many reformers complain that recruiters tricked young women
into working for brothels (Senda, 1973: 89). Instead, when Japanesereformers complained about how women had become prostitutes,
they complained about the parents: that parents had effectivelys̈oldẗheir daughters into prostitution. They had not wanted to go,some women reported. But their parents had induced them to agree
in order to collect the indenture advance.
For the network of overseas comfort stations, the Japanese government drafted recruiting regulations designed to select only
prostitutes already in the industry (Gun’ianjo, 1938; Shina, 1938).
The government – the regulations imply – realized the politicalrisks it was running. Reformers within Japan had been ﬁghting for
decades to ban prostitution. The last thing it needed were accountsof naive young girls duped by mercenary and dishonest recruiters
into a multi-year stint in a Shanghai brothel.
To avoid this morass, the Home Ministry issued clear instructions (Gun’ianjo, 1938; Shina, 1938):

3. The comfort stations
3.1. Venereal disease
The reams of Japanese government documents about the comfort stations from the 1930s and early 1940s make clear that the
government established the institution to ﬁght venereal disease.
To be sure, it had other reasons too. It wanted to reduce rapes.
And one strange 1939 army document from North China suggested
that comfort stations would help the army ﬁght communism within
its ranks (Kitashina, 1939). Primarily, however, the military set up
the stations to ﬁght venereal disease: by deﬁnition, a c̈omfort stationẅas a brothel that had agreed to follow the military’s stringent
sanitation and contraceptive procedures.
The Japanese military did not need additional prostitutes; it had
plenty. Prostitutes have followed armies everywhere, and they followed the Japanese army in Asia. Instead, the Japanese militaryneeded healthy prostitutes. During the army’s Siberian expeditionin 1918, the commanders had found large numbers of their soldiers disabled by venereal disease.6 As the army expanded across
China in the 1930s, it found that there too the local prostitutes
were heavily infected. If its soldiers were going to patronize brothels, it wanted them patronizing brothels that kept the debilitating
diseases in check.
To minimize that risk of disease, the army took several steps.
It licensed those brothels that agreed to meet its standards – andnamed them c̈omfort stations.Ït required prostitutes at the licensed
brothels to undergo weekly medical examinations. If they became
infected, it banned them from serving customers until fully recovered. It ordered all customers to use condoms (provided free either
by the army or by the brothel), and forbad prostitutes from serving anyone who refused to do so. It required all prostitutes andcustomers to wash with disinfectants immediately after sex. And(a) For women traveling for the purpose of prostitution, approvalshall be granted only to those women heading to North andCentral China who are currently working as licensed or effective
prostitutes, who are 21 years old or older, and who are free ofvenereal and other infectious diseases . . .
(b) When receiving the identiﬁcation documents detailed in thepreceding section, the women should understand that theyshould immediately return to Japan upon the conclusion of theirprovisional contract or when that completion is no longer necessary.
(c) Women intending to travel for the purpose of prostitution must
apply to the police ofﬁce for their identiﬁcation documents inperson.
The Ministry told recruiters to hire only women who alreadyworked as prostitutes. To insure that the women knew what they
were agreeing to do, it told police not to issue travel documents
unless each woman applied in person with her contract. And at
the time of the interview, it demanded that the police tell eachapplicant to return immediately when her contract expired.

5

6

Takei (2012: tab. 6), Zai Jokai (1938, 1937).
5, see estimates of days lost, Yamada and Hirama (1923: 269).

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International Review of Law and Economics 65 (2021) 105971

it banned its soldiers from patronizing any brothels other than thelicensed institutions.7

account 3 percent of the gross revenue the prostitute generated.
In addition, the brothel was to pay the woman a fraction of thetotal gross revenue that turned on the amount of her outstanding
debt. With 1,500 yen or more outstanding, she was to receive 40
percent of the revenue; if she had less than 1,500 yen, she was toreceive 50 percent; and if she had no outstanding debt she was totake 60 percent. Of this share, the brothel was to apply 2/3 toward
the remaining debt, and directly pay the prostitute the rest (Maree,
1943; see also U.S. Ofﬁce, 1944).
Upon completing the contractual term or (if earlier) repaying
the loan, the women could go home. A Korean receptionist for comfort stations in Burma and Singapore kept a diary for several years(Choe, 2017a,b). Regularly, comfort women from his brothel completed their terms and returned to their homes. In the course of
his research on comfort women, Kako Senda met a veteran who
had helped to recruit women from Japan. Obviously, he had selfinterested reasons to say what he said. But when Senda (1973:
26-27) asked him, "were there any women who actually paid backthe 1,000 yen [advance] and went free?," "oh, there were," hereplied. "There were lots. Among the ones who went with the ﬁrst
regiment, even those who were slowest paid it off in a few months
and went free."3.2. Contract duration
Although the comfort stations hired their prostitutes on contracts that resembled those used by the Japanese licensed brothels
on some dimensions, the differences were important. To leave thecountryside for work at a Tokyo brothel, a woman wanted someconﬁdence that she would earn wages high enough to offset therisks and harshness of the job, and the hit to her reputation. To
leave for a brothel on the military front, she incurred different vastly
greater risks. Most obviously, she faced all the dangers of war –whether ﬁghting, bombing, or the rampant disease on the front.
She also faced far more serious risks of brothel non-performance.
Should a brothel owner in Tokyo try to cheat on the contract, a prostitute might complain to the police. On the front, she would ﬁnd nopolice except those that worked for the army. In Tokyo she mightsue the brothel owner in court for nonperformance. On the front,
she had no such option. In Tokyo, she could walk out of the brothel,and disappear into the anonymity of the Tokyo metropolis. On thefront, she might be able to do this – but it all depended on wheremore speciﬁcally the brothel might be.
Translating the Tokyo brothel contracts to the front, in otherwords, required changes. The most basic contractual difference: amuch shorter contractual term. Reﬂecting all these risks that followed from the brothel’s location on the front, the contracts usuallyspeciﬁed only two-year terms. Recall that the Japanese contracts
typically provided six-year terms, and the Korean contracts threeyear terms. Some Korean comfort women in Burma worked oncontracts as short as six months to a year (e.g., Josei, 1997: 1–19).

3.5. Prostitute savings
The amount that a prostitute earned beyond her up-front
advance varied. Even by the contractual terms themselves, thatamount depended on the revenue a prostitute generated. Scholars routinely suggest that that brothel owners must have cheatedtheir prostitutes – and no doubt some did. People cheat each otherin any industry.
Crucially, however, many brothel owners did indeed pay theirprostitutes beyond that large up-front advance. The receptionist with the diary noted that the comfort women kept savings
accounts. He noted that he regularly deposited money on theirbehalf in them. And he noted that he regularly sent money backto their homes on their behalf, and received telegrams conﬁrming
receipt (KIH, 2016a; Choe, 2017a,b). Indeed, some comfort women
earned and saved enough to establish comfort stations of their own(Park, 2014: 111).
Of all the Korean comfort women who left accounts, Mun Okju seems to have done well most ﬂamboyantly. She writes in her
memoir (KIH, 2016b):3.3. Contract prices
For these short but potentially dangerous assignments, thebrothels paid (annual) wages much higher than those at the Tokyo
brothels. Typically, for the two-year job they paid several hundred
yen up-front. Sample contracts for Japanese women recruited to
Shanghai comfort stations in 1937 provided advances of 500 to
1,000 yen (Naimusho, 1938). Similarly, Home Ministry documentsfrom 1938 report Japanese women travelling to the Shanghai comfort stations on 600–700 yen advances, with one woman receiving
an advance in the 700−800-yen range, and two in the 300−500-yen
range (Naimusho, 1938).
Note what this means: in compensation for the much higher
risks involved, prostitutes at the comfort stations earned muchhigher pay. Domestic prostitutes in Korea and Japan already earned
considerably more than they would earn in other employment.
Recall that those in Japan earned 1000 yen to 1200 yen on six
year terms. At the comfort stations prostitutes from Japan earned
600–700 yen on two-year terms.

I saved a considerable amount of money from tips. . . . I knewthat all the soldiers put their earnings in the saving accounts
in the ﬁeld post ofﬁce, so I decided to put my money in thesaving account. I asked a soldier to make a personal seal and put
500 yen in the account. . . . I became the owner of the savings
passbook for the ﬁrst time in my life. I worked in Daegu as ananny and a street seller from the childhood but I remained poor
no matter how hard I worked. I could not believe that I could
have so much money in my saving account. A house in Daegu
cost 1,000 yen at the time. I could let my mother have an easy life.
I felt very happy and proud. The savings passbook became mytreasure. . . .
It was fun to go shopping by rickshaw. I can’t forget the experience of shopping in a market in Rangoon. There were lots ofjewelry shops because many jewels were produced in Burma,
and ruby and jade were not expensive. One of my friends collected many jewels. I thought I should have a jewel myself, so I
went and bought a diamond.
I became a popular woman in Rangoon. There were a lot moreofﬁcers in Rangoon than near the frontlines, so I was invited tomany parties. I sang songs at parties and received lots of tips.

3.4. Contract terms
Some of the other contract terms reﬂected the greater insecurity
on the front as well. Take the 1943 military regulations regarding the stations in Malaya. Women in Japan considering a job in
Malaya could reasonably wonder: will I be robbed; when the army
retreats will I be able to carry my savings; if I die will my family haveany access to my money? In response, the regulations required thebrothel to open a (Japanese) postal savings account for each prostitute in her name. It then required the brothel to deposit in the

7
Gunsei (1942), Shina (1942), SCAP (1945), Morikawa (1939), Mandalay (1943),
U.S. Interrogation Report (n.d.), Hito gun (1942).

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International Review of Law and Economics 65 (2021) 105971

3.6. The closing years of the war

to shirk within their unmonitored quarters, the brothels wanted
terms that gave women an incentive to work hard. The womenagreed. Together, the women and brothels concluded indenturecontracts that coupled a large advance with one or two year terms.
Until the last months of the war, the women served their terms or
paid off their debts early, and returned home.

The Japanese government mobilized Korean workers mostaggressively during the last two years of the war, and scholars havesometimes suggested that those were the years it most aggressively
recruited comfort women. In fact, the opposite is true. The closing years were not ones where the government was trying to staff
brothels. Those were years it was moving prostitutes out of brothels
and into munitions factories.
As the war turned bad for Japan, the military began runningout of men. In 1936, 240,000 men served in the army. Once thearmy invaded China, that number climbed to 950,000 (1937). It hit
3.58 million in 1943, 5.4 million in 1944, and 7.34 million in 1945.
Increasingly, the army called up reservists approaching age 40. By
the end of the war, 60.9 percent of the men aged 20–40 had servedin the military, and 2 million had been killed (Watanabe 2014: 1,
8).
The military was also running out of supplies (see generally
Miwa, 2014). As the army called up its 30-something reservists andsent them to the front, it needed others to take their place in themines and factories. It had not drafted its young Koreans (despite
their being Japanese citizens) into the army. By 1944, however, it
did begin sending large numbers of Korean men to those mines
and factories. Simultaneously, it began sending young unmarried
Japanese and Korean women into the factories as well.8
Brothels were the least of the government’s worries. Steadily,brothels and high-end restaurants began to close. The army was
shifting all plausible Japanese men from civilian production to thefront. To replace them it was moving Korean men to Japan. It
was moving both Japanese and Korean women out of homes andinessential jobs and into munitions production.9 Think Rosy the
Riveter in Korea: the Mainichi shimbun newspaper (1944) published a letter from a woman hauling freight in Pusan harbor. Our
country needs us, she exclaimed. J̈ust because we’re women doesn’tmean that we can closet ourselves in our homes.B̈etween the general austerity in the air and the loss of prostitutes to the factories,
brothels steadily went out of business.10

References
Choe, Kilsung, 2017a. Chosen shusshin no choba nin ga mita ianfu no jijitsu [The
Truth About Comfort Women, as Seen by a Korean Receptionist]. Haato
shuppan, Tokyo.
Choe, Sang-Hun, 2017b. Deal with Japan on Former Sex Slaves Failed Victims,
South Korean Panel Says. N.Y Times, Dec. 27.
Chosen, sokakufutokeinempo, 1906. 1906-1942. Zaicho kanren gyosha [Related
Industry Parties in Korea] (1906-1942), in Suzuki, et al. (2006).
Chosen, sokakufu, 1944. Kokumin choyo no kaisetsu [Commentary on Citizen
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Fujinaga, Takeshi, 2000. Chosen shokuminchi shihai to “ianfu” seido no seiritsu
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4. Conclusion
The Japanese army had a problem. It did not lack for brothels.
Prostitutes follow armies everywhere, and they had followed theJapanese army in the 1930s and 1940s. The problem was medical:
these local prostitutes suffered from very high levels of debilitating
venereal disease. If their soldiers were going to frequent brothels,
the command at least wanted them in healthy brothels.
Toward that end – not toward better public health but toward
maintaining a deadlier military force – the military imported thestandard Japanese and Korean licensing system. Brothels and prostitutes registered with it. Designated physicians conducted weekly
medical examinations. Brothels required condoms, and prostitutes
were told to refuse clients who balked. Both clients and prostitutes
were to wash with disinfectant after every encounter.
The contracts themselves followed basic game theoretic principles of c̈redible commitments.B̈rothel owners (not the military)
hired the bulk of the new prostitutes, and hired most of themfrom Japan and Korea. Realizing the incentive brothel owners had
to exaggerate their future earnings, women wanted a large portion of their pay upfront. Brothels agreed. Knowing that they were
headed for the front, women wanted a maximum service length.
Brothels agreed. In turn, realizing the incentive the women had

8Hatarakeru (1943), Romu (1943), Chosen (1944, 1945), Higuchi (2005: 53).
Senso (1943), Hanto (1944).
10
Senso (1943), Hata (1992: 330, 333), Hakken (1943).
97

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Further reading
Suzuki, Y., et al., 2006. Nihongun “inanfu” kankei shiryo shusei[Collection of Materials Relating to the Japanese Military “Comfort
Women”], 1. Akashi shoten, Tokyo.

8