A Korean politician on a board for women and families once claimed that there are around 50,000 Korean prostitutes in Japan, some 2,500 in Australia and 250 in Guam. “In the whole world there are 100,000,” said Okuyi Kim.
The reason why so many Korean women enter the world’s oldest profession? Well, money must be the main one. 10 Korean women arrested in Canada in May 2012 gave that explanation to police.
Foreign prostitutes in the US are said to be 23.5% Korean, the largest of any nationality, followed by 11.7% Thai and 10% Peruvian. With Korea’s own tightening of prostitution laws in 2004, it started to become popular to go abroad to work, especially when Koreans were able to visit America without a visa from 2008.
Los Angeles police have said that about 90% of the department’s 70-80 monthly arrests for prostitution involve Korean women.
An increasing number of Korean girls are heading to Dubai to earn their money.
According to Pusan Metropolitan Police, most prostitutes working in brothels overseas leave Korea on two-month travel visas and earn 20-30 million won ($1,700-2,700) a month.
The figures are a bit old but a 2007 government report estimated there were 270,000 women working in the domestic sex industry, equivalent to around 6% of the GDP. 10% of Korean prostitutes work outside their country.
All this speculation, though, fuels right-wing apologists’ arguments that the wartime comfort women did not need to be “forced” into servicing the Japanese army’s soldiers.
