Kim Ae-ran is a fifty-eight-year-old former prostitute living in South Korea. She's been reading in the news about how her country is seeking apologies and other reparations from the government of Japan and it's been pissing her off. Not because she disagrees-- she just thinks the U.S. government's involvement in her country's underworld should be addressed as well.
“Our government was one big pimp for the U.S. military,” she says, and that's just the beginning...
Today's New York Times features a story on women who were tools of the South Korean government, which they accuse of boosting prostitution in the country in order to stabilize the economy and keep the Americans satiated.
The Korean police would then detain the prostitutes who were thought to be ill, the women said, locking them up under guard in so-called monkey houses, where the windows had bars. There, the prostitutes were forced to take medications until they were well.
The women... compared themselves to the so-called comfort women who have won widespread public sympathy for being forced into prostitution by the Japanese during World War II. Whether prostitutes by choice, need or coercion, the women say, they were all victims of government policies.
A woman, identified only as "Bae" in the above and other photographs, is 80-years-old, living on welfare and off of an oxygen machine. Her loose collective seeks compensation and an official apology, which we doubt will come anytime soon...
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