J.M. Ramseyer

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: Shimabaraand 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 toexplore 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 barmaids 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 inKorea. 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 8yen on a visit to a Japanese licensed prostitute in Korea (Kim andKim 2018: 26, 89, 96; Nihon yuran, 1932: 461). In one (apparentlypoorer) 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 toManchuria to work as prostitutes (Fujinaga, 1998). In 1929, 196

2.3. Prostitution in Korea
1. The phenomenon. – As Japanese emigrants began to move toKorea, 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).