Victimized Korean Women Say Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied

While traveling throughout Korea, I have witnessed some sad and distressing sights. Examples include the street behind Seoul’s Tapgol Park, where homeless and apparently hopeless old people gather every day; Uiryeong, where a policeman went berserk in 1982, killing 57 people and then himself; Masan, the site of massive environmental degradation due to nearly a century of industrialization and unfettered development; the casino in Sabuk, where Koreans gamble their lives away; Sorokdo, designated during the Japanese colonial era as the country’s main leper colony; and Ansan, home to most of the teenage victims of the 2014 Sewol disaster. Each of those and others are enough to make you weep.

But worst of all, in my view, is Sangpaedong Cemetery in Dongducheon a few miles south of the Demilitarized Zone. Set on a steep hill not far from Camp Casey, it is the final resting place for hundreds of poor people. There is nothing remotely dignified about it. The graves, most of which seem to have been dug in a hasty manner, are arranged haphazardly. Some have a small concrete marker or a wooden stick with a name and number, but many lack even that. A fair percentage of the deceased were yanggongjus (literally, “Western princesses”), Korean sex workers from the local gijichon (“military village”) whose only job was to keep American soldiers somewhat happy. Twice I have wandered through Sangpaedong, and I tell you an olfactory component wafts up from those shallow graves. It is the smell of decomposing bodies.

Once, when I worked for the Korea Times, I wrote a column about this topic. Dated October 18, 2019, it was given the headline “Hypocrisy, Pure and Simple.” I detailed how the post–Korean War yanggongjus are perceived differently from the so-called comfort women whom the Japanese had forced into sexual slavery during World War II. The “comfort women,” whose numbers are dwindling fast, are the subjects of almost universal respect and affection here. These two groups obviously have much in common, but the main difference is that the “comfort women” were taken and put to work—so to speak—by the detested Japanese. The yanggongjus, by contrast, were victimized by their own countrymen. I asserted in my Korea Times story that the ROK was trying to have it both ways: happy to play the victim but disinclined to acknowledge that the national governments of Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-hee, provincial governors, mayors, the police, the military, gangsters and bogus job-placement agencies had all been involved in enticing and coercing poor Korean females into service at bars, brothels and massage parlors patronized by American soldiers. Yes, the presence of the Yanks helped deter a repeat of North Korea’s invasion on June 25, 1950. All to the good, plus the fact that these women generated much-needed revenue, almost a quarter of the country’s GDP in the early 1960s.

Much changed as the decades went by. The South Korean economy boomed, the U.S. fell into the bottomless pit that was the Vietnam War, and the gijichons were cleaned up if not entirely eliminated. The yanggongjus, who had long been silent and shamed, started speaking for themselves. In 2022, they won a legal decision wherein the ROK Supreme Court ruled that the government had connived with the U.S. military to illegally promote the sex trade, horribly abusing the women.

And in the summer of 2025, more than 100 of them took it a step further by filing a lawsuit—albeit in a Seoul court—targeting the American military. Through their attorney, Ha Ju-hee, the surviving women demanded that the U.S. apologize and compensate each of them $7,200, much as the Japanese have done regarding the so-called comfort women. For example, one 66-year-old woman said that at the tender age of 16 she was sold to a pimp catering to GIs whose ostensible purpose was to defend South Korea. The U.S. military, she claimed, knew that minors like her were regularly brought into the sex trafficking trade but did nothing to stop it. Indeed, the Americans facilitated it.

According to another one, “Every night we were dragged to U.S. soldiers and sexually abused. Every week we were forced to undergo venereal disease tests. If there was the slightest abnormality, we were locked in a small room and injected with a thick needle of strong penicillin. The shots were so harsh that my legs gave out and I couldn’t even walk.”

These women, long scorned by Korean society, said in their lawsuit that they had been treated like a shameful underside of the ROK’s alliance with the United States. The fact that I am an American citizen does not affect my opinion in the least. I hope they win their suit as well as the same kind of sympathy extended to the “comfort women.” Visit Sangpaedong Cemetery, and see if you do not agree.