From Comfort Woman to Comfort Child

America’s Comfort Women

During the latter years of the Empire of Japan’s colonial expansion, the military leadership conceived of comfort women as a way to improve troop morale and combat readiness without the threat of sexually transmitted infection (STI) transmission, making available a wide array of quick commercial services for sexual and psychic comforts throughout Asia and the Pacific. Estimates on the number of women and girls recruited into the system of military sexual slavery range between fifty thousand and two hundred thousand, but Korean women seem to compose a significant portion. While considered by most to be emblematic of Japanese crimes and atrocities committed in the years surrounding World War II, the institution resembled other forms of colonial prostitution and concubinage seen previously in Asia, as well as imperial practices that would continue to evolve in the region throughout the Cold War era.

Archival evidence making clear the genealogical connections between the Japanese comfort women system and the U.S. military sex industry is abundant, considering for years camptown women were referred to in South Korean law, press reports, and colloquially as wianbu (a Korean-language version of the Japanese euphemism ianfu, translating to “comfort women”). Beginning in the early 1950s, legislation regulating the health of sex workers openly used the term to indicate those who serviced U.S. soldiers.19 Throughout the postwar era, journalists regularly described camptown women as military “comfort women” in their reporting.20 U.S. camptown women have even historically called themselves “comfort women,” using the Korean translation of this Japanese euphemism to name their own associations and societies. One example is the Wianbu Chahwarhoe (Comfort Women Rehabilitation Association) that was active in the Dongducheon area during the 1970s.21 Indeed, the widespread usage of the term comfort women to refer to those women servicing U.S. soldiers is not simply a matter of describing imperial patterns and behaviors reproduced across foreign militaries but also the result of the system being an actual derivative of Japanese colonial-era policies around public prostitution and military sex work.

Between 1945, when the U.S. military arrived to transfer power from the Japanese empire and declared itself the governing force of southern Korea, and 1947, when the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) outlawed colonial-era regulations regarding public prostitution, U.S. servicemen frequented various facilities already set up by the imperial government. The outlawing of public sex work did not end prostitution for U.S. soldiers in the years thereafter; rather, it privatized the industry as those displaced and impoverished following years of Japanese colonial rule flocked to U.S. bases looking for a chance to better their economic circumstances. When STI rates among U.S. soldiers subsequently rose, this put the important work of regulating and monitoring the sexual health of Korean women within the purview of U.S. military authorities. Camptowns consequently formed as the cluster of businesses outside U.S. gates offering sex and recreation to off-duty soldiers under the careful watch of military leadership. Other private establishments noncompliant with U.S. military standards were not included within the camptown’s borders and instead were designated “off-limits.”22 Between the years of 1947 and 1949 (the end of official USAMGIK rule), the U.S. military thus was solely responsible for consolidating the former Japanese colonial “comfort stations” and “houses of prostitution” into a military sex industry that would benefit its troops.23 Local Korean authorities helped to assist the U.S. military’s demands for “sanitized sex,” while American officials dispensed adequate quantities of sulfonamides, mepharsin, bismuth, and penicillin for the forcible treatment of infected women.24 Shortly after, in the summer of 1948, the U.S. military formally inaugurated the South Korean government and began withdrawing its troops, leaving just a small military advisory group of five hundred personnel by June of 1949. The almost complete removal of U.S. soldiers from South Korea created an intense scattering on the part of sex workers formerly servicing the American military, but the outbreak of war changed this, marking the return of hundreds of thousands of foreign military personnel back to the peninsula.

During the Korean War, comfort stations or wianso were erected and maintained by the South Korean military to protect civilian women from rape, while also providing regulated sexual recreation for foreign soldiers without the threat of STIs that could reduce the strength of U.S. forces. Older camptown women of this generation reiterate in their oral histories the numerous incidents of kidnapping and sexual violence perpetrated by the U.S. military before the comfort women system was instituted. One woman recalls:

Virgins, married women, young girls, even grandmothers—the U.S. soldiers would rape all the women. They wouldn’t touch the kids, but if you were over sixteen years old . . . My older sister even hid in a large earthenware jar at night, and my uncle’s sister hid too—because they were afraid of being raped.25

Of importance is the fact that the South Korean army had been trained by imperial Japanese forces. Following so-called liberation, the USAMGIK reinstated those very same collaborators into South Korea’s government and military leadership. Thus, the creation of comfort stations by the South Korean army seems to have been directly borrowed from the previous system established under Japanese colonial rule. Other establishments, also called “comfort stations,” were set up by civilians and functioned as “private businesses that secured approval from the authorities.”26 According to one South Korean military document, eighty-nine “comfort women” (rotating between three “comfort station” units in Seoul and one unit in Gangneung) collectively gave 204,560 “comfort services” to soldiers in 1952.27 Such a figure represents an average of six comfort services per day per comfort woman that year. Further, there was at least one division of mobile comfort women consisting of seventy-nine women who went “to the front lines” to service soldiers engaged in direct combat.28 All such women were tested for STIs twice a week. After the Korean War, these comfort stations were reappropriated into dance halls and service clubs for U.S. military personnel, where military prostitution resumed.29 For decades thereafter, comfort woman was a term much more widely associated with U.S. military camptown women than those who serviced the Japanese before and during the years of World War II.

It was not until Japan’s comfort women received unprecedented international attention in the early 1990s that the term became dissociated from the U.S. camptown military sex industry. At first, however, South Korean activists chose the term chongshindae (commonly translating to “voluntary labor corps”), both as a way to “highlight the deceptive and/or coercive methods that had been used in the recruitment of comfort women in colonial Korea” and as a way “to avoid the negative image of prostitutes evoked by the term wianbu.”30 But as the redress movement gained international traction, Western scholars and researchers reiterated the euphemism in their reporting. Eventually, comfort women became the dominant English-language term—justified as a matter of historical accuracy or, in other words, to capture “wartime practices and attitudes that perpetuate wartime views of the women.”31 At the same time, Korean and American researchers began to use different terminology to refer to those women sexually serving the U.S. military. The term kijich’on yŏsŏng (translating to “camptown woman”) replaced the more historic comfort woman and helped to further draw this distinction between those prostituted to Japanese imperial soldiers versus those prostituted to U.S. military personnel. As feminist scholar Laura Hyun Yi Kang observes, “The repeated compulsion to deploy but to distance oneself from ‘comfort women’ reminds anew that the naming of any particular atrocity or crime, in transnational frame, risks focalizing certain subjects at the expense of derogating others.”32 In this case, it is Japan’s comfort women who are focalized and camptown women who are erased from the historical processes that might help others see their oppression and experiences as linked to that of others subjugated and exploited by foreign militaries. Even now, the dominant view of camptown women in South Korea and the United States remains that they were not sex slaves like the Japanese comfort women but were willing prostitutes who went to the camptowns to sell their bodies in exchange for U.S. dollars, creating a distinct hierarchy of oppression between these two groups.

In her 1999 essay, Katharine H. S. Moon criticizes this very refusal on the part of chongshindae movement leaders to acknowledge the plight of U.S. camptown women as being parallel to that of comfort women survivors, arguing that these women shared significant lived historical experiences.33 When one carefully surveys the rich body of scholarly research, oral history, memoir, and other works on Japan’s comfort women and U.S. military camptown women, the following similarities can be gleaned: within both groups exist those recruited deceptively or even forcibly by agents who collaborated with the imperial powers at hand; women were young and some even were children at the time of their conscription; intense regulation came from the military brass, and the goal was to provide soldiers unfettered access to Korean women’s sexual labor without the threat of sexually transmitted infections that could reduce combat readiness; as such, once the women were laboring in a comfort station, they were regularly and forcibly tested for STIs, quarantined, and treated by military officials or collaborating local health authorities; women performed in a wide range of facilities, from government-operated brothels to those resembling bars and night clubs; comfort work varied from that of a sex worker to the role of live-in girlfriends, concubines, and local wives, with some women even marrying their Japanese or American clientele, migrating abroad afterward, and creating transnational families; as women structurally bound to their brothels via military decrees and orders, systems of debt-bondage, and policing, their movements were severely curtailed; they remained vulnerable to abuses and intense violence from their clientele, their overseers, health officials, military and government authorities, and all those they encountered daily; as a result, countless women were murdered while working to service foreign soldiers.34 For years after their time in the military sex industry,

they bore guilty consciences, simply because of the knowledge that they had been prostitutes. They suffered from the prejudice and discrimination of their relatives and friends. Many still had venereal disease or from time to time suffered its recurrence. . . . Many women subsequently found that they were barren, and many still suffer from . . . womb infections, high blood pressure, stomach trouble, heart trouble, nervous breakdowns, mental illness and so on. The psychological aftermath is far more serious than the breakdowns or mental disorders . . . haunted by delusions of persecution, shame and inferiority. They tend to retain a distrust and hatred of men. . . . People around the women tend to despise them.35

Orated by a comfort women movement leader to capture survivors’ enduring trauma, this description applies “verbatim to the plight of US camptown women” as well.36

Distinctions between Japan’s comfort women system and the U.S. camptown military sex industry might perhaps be best understood in thinking through the difference between formal colonial rule (Japan instituted this system for its soldiers across its colonial possessions) versus neocolonial rule (the fact that the United States regulated prostitution in its occupied zones without formally annexing territories). While the first half of the twentieth century was marked by rivalry between Western and Japanese colonial powers, the Cold War years were, in many ways, a struggle to win the allegiances of the decolonizing Third World. U.S. empire thus took on a more insidious quality. This required adjustment within an existing colonial structure in Asia to create an image of U.S. power and intervention in the region not as that of an empire exerting its ambition but rather as a democratizing and liberating force. As such, indirect forms of control and coercion replaced more explicit mechanisms of oversight regarding military prostitution for foreign soldiers in Cold War Korea. Within this transformation, the optics and tools for control slightly differed, although the inherent ideologies and imperial and masculinist power structures that governed military sex work within these two systems remained very much the same. Yet even so, the level of U.S. government involvement is undeniable. As discussed earlier, the U.S. military was the sole governing force in the southern half of the Korean peninsula and was therefore directly responsible for instituting and enforcing the entire system of STI control during the initial years of military occupation. After the inauguration of the South Korean government, the U.S. military passed much of the work of STI enforcement onto locals, who were consistently pressured by U.S. military personnel to keep camptown prostitution to their liking (in terms of hygiene and disease control) or else face potentially devastating geopolitical or economic consequences in the form of troop withdrawals or off-limit decrees.37

Thus, U.S. empire also helps to dissociate Japan’s comfort women from U.S. military camptown women as it remains invested in obscuring or ameliorating its own disreputable imperial practices across the globe, all the while building on the existing discourse of Orientalism to legitimize its authority in Asia. To the latter point, Maki Kimura’s work shows how the comfort women system has been incorrectly and ahistorically characterized by Americans as a distinctively Japanese formation despite the fact that regulated prostitution was first developed by Europeans to manage intimacy in their colonial possessions.38 Kimura further asserts that regulated prostitution was introduced to Japan via foreign trade and traces the origins of the comfort women system to a treaty signed between Japan and the United States in 1858. Following this treaty, European and American delegates requested the setting up of red-light districts for foreigners. Given its origins in colonial racism and the ways that the Japanese government appropriated Western modes of managing imperial subjects and sexually exploiting and subjugating Asian bodies, one might argue that the institution of regulated prostitution is inherently anti-Asian. Nonetheless, when the redress movement gained international traction in the 1990s, the comfort women issue was framed “as an expression of a uniquely Japanese barbarism.”39 Further, as “a case of nonwhite and non-US abuse and exploitation of Asian women,” comfort women did not “trouble the US-centric focalization of human rights and women’s rights as human rights.”40 Building upon the already well-established discourse of Orientalism produced by centuries of Western colonialism, the comfort women system was constructed as an exceptional, barbaric, and uniquely Asian practice that embodied the kinds of war crimes committed by the Japanese during World War II.

This was then further bolstered by dominant postwar narratives shaped by U.S. empire that framed the United States as a good nation that had won the “good war” and rescued the people of Asia and the Pacific from the tyranny of Japanese colonialism. We might understand such a characterization of Japan’s comfort women system as an inflection of American exceptionalism that not only helps to justify U.S. postwar supremacy, whereby the United States is the ultimate upholder of democracy and enforcer of global human rights, but also does work to obfuscate and distract from the U.S. military’s own disreputable imperial practices, including the institutionalized system of military sex work across its occupation zones.41 Ironically, during and immediately after World War II, it was also the U.S. government that played a direct role in covering up Japanese war crimes and supplanting the severity of the comfort women system (beginning with the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and culminating in a normalization of diplomatic and economic relations between South Korea and Japan in 1965) at the very moment it was utilizing military prostitution for its soldiers throughout Asia.42 It is no surprise, then, that U.S. military documents—such as “Japanese Prisoner of War Interrogation Report No. 49” (noting that “a comfort girl is nothing more than a prostitute or professional camp follower attached to the Japanese Army”)—are appropriated by right-wing Japanese nationalists and comfort women denialists.43 Interestingly enough, that description of “comfort girls” is the general sentiment many U.S. military officials, South Koreans, and American academics continue to have about camptown women to this day.

What should not get lost in this discussion, however, is the role of South Korean nationalism, which also depends on the status quo of U.S. military domination and the persistence of the postwar global world order that positions it as the legitimate Korean state over the North. Building off the comfort women activists’ initial impulse to distance themselves from U.S. military prostitution, nationalist narratives have emphasized the youth and virginity of comfort women survivors as a metaphor and allegory for an innocent nation raped and ravaged by the empire of Japan. In doing so, they have invisibilized the participation of Korean agents in the deceptive recruitment of young women and children as military comfort women and the ways that such a system depended not only on government-sanctioned facilities but also on the work of private citizens and collaborators who profited off the sexual labor of Korean women. For decades, these distortions allowed South Koreans to disavow their own patriarchal collaboration with such an institution and ignore the ongoing struggles of U.S. military camptown women, all the while reappropriating the human suffering of the comfort women to service their own “male nationalistic aspirations.”44 In 2008, the anthropologist C. Sarah Soh argued that these sensationalized “partial truths” had become what she called the “paradigmatic narrative” of Japan’s comfort women.45 Since then, however, the narrative has shifted, and feminist activists linking comfort women to other forms of gendered and sexualized violence (camptown women included) see this as one of the redress movement’s most important enduring legacies.46 It bears noting that in September of 2022, the South Korean Supreme Court ruled in favor of one hundred former camptown women who sued the government for its collaboration with the U.S. military in upholding a sex industry for foreign soldiers.47 Utilizing the term comfort woman to describe their experiences of “sexual slavery,” their journey for reparations reminds us of the shared historical, ideological, and material continuity between these two groups.48

America’s Comfort Children

The first memoir published in South Korea by a self-proclaimed comfort woman was the 1965 best-seller My Forsaken Star, written by Annie Park—a mixed-race girl who began entertaining U.S. soldiers at the young age of sixteen.49 In an important scene in which Annie observes her mother being jeered at by local children for having once fraternized with foreign soldiers, she comes to the epiphany that “because of my existence, my mother was forever branded as a western whore.”50 Indeed, it was mixed-race children who first made comfort women hypervisible to the South Korean public and analogous with those who sexually serviced the U.S. military. In 1965, the U.S. public would also learn of Annie Park’s story in a popular Time magazine article entitled “Confucius’ Outcasts.”51 Their introduction to this “half-caste” daughter of a prostitute turned sex worker herself served as a stern warning to Americans about what could happen to their mixed-race progeny left behind in South Korea without quick intervention. However, it was not the first time Americans had come to learn of these children as the sons and daughters of U.S. military comfort women. By 1965, American missionaries, voluntary workers, and philanthropists had already been assisting mixed-race children in South Korea for nearly a decade. As these quasi-social workers became well acquainted with the happenings in camptowns, their policy recommendations regarding mixed-race children’s welfare were informed by the understanding that Korean mothers were prostitutes and therefore unfit to raise them. The reality, however, was that the problems experienced by Annie Park and other mixed-race Koreans of her generation had less to do with their mothers and more to do with the imperial culture created by Americans during their formal rule of southern Korea.

In the early USAMGIK years, military authorities did not permit their servicemen to marry Korean women, denied such petitions for marriage, and even refused to recognize marriages that had occurred via Korean law, viewing such arrangements as “illegal” and a “violation of a standing order.”52 This was the case even when the couple had become pregnant or bore a child. Although Korean women met U.S. servicemen in a multitude of venues beyond military bars and brothels—working as translators, librarians, secretaries, and a range of other service jobs to support the efforts of the occupiers—they were largely viewed by military authorities as prostitutes and therefore as unsuitable marriage partners for American soldiers. Such racial stereotyping of Korean women resulted in the routine separation of mixed-race families throughout the 1950s and 1960s, justified by the U.S. military as a matter of anti-Asian immigration laws, as well as those prohibiting miscegenation stateside. As GIs were transferred out of South Korea or thrown into military jail by their commanding officers for having pursued relations with Korean women beyond regulated prostitution, the mothers of mixed-race children were left in precarious circumstances. Yet in spite of the problems created by U.S. military policies, child welfare professionals advocating the removal of these children from South Korea and placement into American families via adoption built on this racist and sexist discourse, shifting blame onto Korean mothers. The following 1961 report made by International Social Service (ISS) social worker Anne Davison was widely circulated to foreign agencies operating in South Korea at the time:

Most of the mixed racial children in Korea are illegitimate because their mothers are casual or regular prostitutes of foreign servicemen. Of course the girl does not want to remain in that category, and she hopes constantly that he will marry her and take her away. . . . If she lives with him and had his child, the baby may be used as a lever to try to press him into marriage. . . . Sometimes the girl leads the man on, with no intention of leaving her way of life. She promises to marry and emigrate. . . . If he must leave early, then she may refuse to follow him. She blames legal offices, friends, and welfare workers, as excuses for her own indecision. . . . Girls who make a success of prostitution financially, are in a position where they can hire an older woman or a friend to care for the child. The mother can then write directly to the father, ask for support, or better still, from her point of view, beg him to divorce his wife and come back and marry her. The children are being held for blackmail purposes, and not loved by the mother or given the security of a home environment.53

Another reason the mothers do not give up the children is that they are attractive to the GI, which sometimes helps the mother through gifts by the soldiers to the mother and child. Also if the mother is a prostitute, she finds a mixed blood child of benefit in meeting and associating with the servicemen. . . . It has become well known in these areas that many agencies are desirous of securing the mixed blood children. Many mothers or women keeping children for the mothers have demanded money to release the children. Some mothers have claimed that another agency has paid for children. This is strictly rumor. I know of no such case where it is a proven fact. However servicemen often pay the mothers for the release of children they become interested in. Many children are being held with this prospect in view.54

In framing Korean mothers as duplicitous prostitutes and hardened professionals who did not even love their own children, these social studies turned existing hearsay and prejudice into more legitimated pseudo-scientific and scholarly truths. In these ways, social workers used their professional clout and institutional power to help the U.S. military disavow its racist and imperialist practices by scapegoating the problems of mixed-race children on Korean women instead. However, more obscure archival documents tell a different story. ISS would later internally report that strong “affectional relations between mother and child” were the main cause of Korean women “not wishing to give up their children for adoption.”55 This resulted in a severe shortage of mixed-race orphans actually in need of rescue, thus vexing U.S. humanitarians who were facing strong demand for these children from majority white American families stateside. To create more adoptable “orphans” that could be placed into U.S. homes, the notion that Korean women were not “real mothers” (but, rather, real prostitutes) led to more aggressive methods of procuring children via deception, coercion, and fraud.56

Indeed, constructions of Korean mothers as prostitutes justified the profoundly violent and anti-Asian practices used to obtain mixed-race children that characterized many of the very first international adoptions out of South Korea. Because orphanages were quickly depleted of the mixed-race Koreans who were given up by mothers in hard circumstances, adoption agencies routinely took census of those children living in and around camptowns, going on what they called “baby hunts” and “child-finding” missions.57 Here, social workers would approach Korean women with mixed-race children and ask them to relinquish their sons and daughters to U.S. families. Adoption professionals used both ideological and material coercion to make their cases to birth mothers, telling them that loving their children meant “sending them to the United States for the good of their future and life.”58 Monetary bribes in which social workers paid mothers “money for the release of a child” were not so uncommon, nor were instances of physical confrontation to prize mixed-race children out of their mothers’ arms.59 Adoption agencies often refused to take no for an answer once they discovered the whereabouts of a mixed-race child and would continually harass those women who had declined their initial offers until they relented.60 The record of a complaint made by one Korean pediatrician hired to assess the health of soon-to-be adopted mixed-race children is telling:

Dr. Rho was particularly concerned now about the efforts in Korea to force mothers of mixed blood children to give up these children. She stated that she had witnessed on three different occasions the mothers actually being physically forced to give up their children.61

In some instances, the force escalated to outright assaults, as Korean women’s faces were made “swollen and bruised” by U.S. adoption authorities.62 When some mothers changed their minds early on in the adoption process, American agencies even outright lied to these women, telling them that it was too late and that their children “had already been sent to the United States” when in fact they were still in South Korea.63 Sadly, many women did not even know what they were relinquishing their children for, as many were improperly informed of what an international adoption fully entailed. Social workers were eager to quell the anxieties of uncertain, tentative women and even outright lied to mothers to obtain a child’s “release as soon as possible.”64 Some Korean women were advised to think of adoption as a study abroad opportunity in which their children would eventually return.65 They would write letters to their sons and daughters shortly following their relinquishment, only to be cut off later by alarmed adoptive families.66 Now, in old age, the loss of their children is a common topic in group therapy sessions among camptown women.67 These mothers lament to each other: “If I knew it would be like this, I wouldn’t have sent them. I would have held onto them.”68

In the United States, adoptive parents learned about the camptown origins of their newly adopted children, if not from stories told to them by U.S. soldiers, humanitarians, or missionaries returning from South Korea, then from the social workers involved in their cases. Child history reports and social studies included any known or presumed information about mixed-race Koreans’ biological parents. For instance, the professions of their mothers were almost always listed as “prostitute,” whether or not this was actually the case.69 The U.S. press also continued, throughout the 1960s, to publish accounts of “little girls, eight and 10 years old” from South Korea who “become prostitutes . . . or they die” in their reports advocating adoption.70 It is probably for all these reasons that many adopted women report being told by their adoptive families that their mothers were “whores” and that, had they not been taken in by Americans, they would have ended up prostitutes as well.71 Because these early international adoptions had occurred at a time before there were legal and procedural safeguards in place to protect adopted children from mistreatment and negligence in the United States, many American families had adopted Korean children without proper vetting and without any follow up from child welfare professionals.72 As a result, abuse was rampant for those placed into U.S. families during the 1950s and 1960s, as were failed adoptions in which children were rehomed after a family decided it no longer wanted to raise them following a challenging adjustment.73 A 1968 study found that among the adoptions of one agency occurring between the years of 1956 to 1968, about one in every ten placements yielded a failure.74

In extreme cases, adopted girls also inherited their mother’s histories of sexual violence in the homes in which they were placed.75 While sexual abuse is a devastating experience common among too many American girls, the difference here that might suggest there is something structural about this violence against Korean children is that these were the assumed daughters of U.S. military comfort women. From the U.S. military to social workers, lawmakers, journalists, and adoptive parents, various groups of Americans had participated in institutionalizing a colonial discourse that racialized Korean women and girls as pathologically and perpetually linked to prostitution.76 That they were also coercively taken from their birth mothers and transferred across national borders with little to no government oversight made them all the more vulnerable, and their “hypersexualization” by Americans all the more dangerous.77 One woman surmises that both she and her sister were adopted “so that she could be used by Dad in ‘that way.’”78 While it is impossible to fully know the exact intentions of these abusive adoptive parents now, it is no surprise that some mixed-race adoptees—who were taken from their Korean mothers via deception and fraud, transported across national borders, and continually abused by adoptive families who paid to adopt them—went as far as to name what they experienced “human trafficking” or “sexual slavery.”79

Conclusion

His wife was infertile, but they loved each other. So when I told him that I was pregnant with his child he made a call to his wife. He told her that there is a woman with whom he lives in Korea and now she is pregnant. He asked her what she thought they should do. His wife sent me a letter. . . . In it, she thanked me and asked me to carry the baby for her. She said that she would pretend to be pregnant like I am, and stay at the hospital for 10 months. She asked me to give birth to the baby and then send it to her. So this lady lied about the pregnancy to her entire family. Even to this day, only the wife, husband, and doctor know the truth. That’s how they took her, this lump of blood that was born less than a hundred days ago. And then they never contacted me back. All I got afterwards was one thank you letter from the wife, money, and an underskirt. . . .

Even a day or two later, I still didn’t feel as if I had sent my child away to another country. I just felt as if they were taking care of my child for a little while. That’s what I thought. And then I just started to go crazy. Every time I heard a baby crying I couldn’t stand it. So, I would run out to the store and start drinking makkŏlli. I would come back drunk and ask my friend “Where’s my baby?” . . . My friend would say “You bitch, the baby left!” I was a little bit crazy back then. . . . Yeah, I was so crazy. I had just sent my child away, yet here I was asking where the baby is. And then my friend said “You bitch, we took him to the airport! Come to your senses! What’s wrong with you?” So, I thought “Oh my God, I’m going crazy. My poor little baby . . . ” After that my friend started to get rid of the remaining diapers, baskets, and everything else that I had for the child. She just got rid of all of that stuff. And then I went even crazier. I would go out to this little stream. I would just go out into the water and drink. . . . I was crazy like that. I was just out of my mind. . . . I told my friends to just go away and leave me alone. But they kept coming to me every day and they kept trying to knock me to my senses. They told me to eat. They would put spoons full of food into my mouth and tell me to swallow. . . . I decided I should just die. So, one day, I took some drugs, drank the makkŏlli, slit my wrists and I just laid there.80

The preceding excerpt from Jeong Ja Kim’s 2013 memoir entitled Hidden Truth of the U.S. Military Comfort Woman makes clear how Korean women have not only been expected to provide sexual labor to foreign soldiers but also serviced ordinary Americans through their reproductive labor with devastating costs. While Kim was too young to be a former Japanese comfort woman herself, having been born sometime between the years of 1950 and 1953, the explicit usage of the term comfort woman in her memoir’s title reflects a genealogy of gendered and sexualized violence related by adoptee cultural producers and further explored in this essay. If comfort work is understood as forcible or coerced intimacy performed by Korean women or children under the duress of imperial rule or colonial subjugation, then this article has revealed how the institutions of military prostitution and international adoption are structurally connected in two important ways: first, in how Korean women’s reproductive labor for U.S. adoptive families was an extension of their work as military comfort women, and second, how some adopted children, as the unintended consequence of that comfort work, were reappropriated as conscripts of U.S. empire in their placement into U.S. homes. In 1959, nearly eight hundred thousand more American families wished to adopt than there were adoptable children in the United States at that time.81 For couples who were having fertility issues, mixed-race children seemed an obvious solution to this domestic shortage and provided them an opportunity to have a nuclear family and achieve white middle-class domesticity, all the while helping the nation to espouse its Cold War ideals of internationalism and racial liberalism.82 The interracial and international adoptions of Korean children, then, not only helped to ameliorate the U.S. military’s disreputable Cold War practices in Asia but also provided American families emotional and social completion. However, mixed-race children were not enfolded into white heteronormative family structures in uncomplicated ways. Ironically, the same anti-Asian racism that produced military prostitution, separated Korean American families, and stripped Korean women of their maternal rights would continue to shape the experiences of mixed-race children in their adoptive U.S. homes and communities. In some tragic cases, adopted children were also abused in ways comparable to their mothers. If indeed comfort women is a term that has been reiterated by scholars and researchers as a matter of historical accuracy—to capture wartime attitudes and views of those who sexually and psychically serviced foreign soldiers—then comfort child, a term created by adoptees, can provide us a critical historical framework to the trace discursive, ideological, and material continuities in the lived experiences of various Korean diasporic women and children across time and space.

Yuri W. Doolan is assistant professor of history and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, as well as the inaugural chair of Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America (Oxford University Press, 2024). Some of his shorter works have appeared in the Journal of American Ethnic History, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Diplomatic History.