A Turbid River of History and Law: The Procurement of Women in Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea

Japanese military brothels during the Pacific War, known as comfort stations, and the predicaments of women confined there still reverberate in public memory. Of late a growing number of scholars have called for approaching the comfort women issue from a broader historical context, linking it to Japan’s prewar state-regulated prostitution, later transplanted into its colonies, and human trafficking. This article discusses the legal frameworks of indentured contracts and criminal prosecution surrounding the procurement of women in imperial Japan and colonial Korea. Most women entered prostitution impressed by poverty when the law fully recognized their agency as independent contractors. The age-old machinery of advanced loan agreements, signed or guaranteed in many cases by destitute parents, revealed how the ill-guided idea of filial piety muddled the boundaries between the exercise of legal rights and their abuses. The judicial process dealing with prostitution contracts and also the crimes of abduction and kidnapping helps understand how law and state institutions operated in the Japanese colonial empire. The recent historiographical debate on the comfort women raises critical questions about the conditions under which the past is assessed.