Locals call it the Monkey House. The decaying, three-story cement fortress sits among weeds in the wooded, hilly outskirts of Dongducheon, a Korean city of 96, that encircles Camp Casey, the closest U. For those who live in Dongducheon, however, the base and surrounding town hold a mixed and painful legacy. Between the end of the Korean War and the early s, more than one million Korean women were caught up in a state-controlled prostitution industry that was blessed at the highest levels by the U.
They worked in special zones surrounding U. These camp towns were known to the Koreans as kijichon. The system was designed to strengthen the U. The Monkey House was a virtual prison for sex workers. Their object was to ensure the sexual hygiene of American troops; rates of venereal disease among the GIs in South Korea were then far above the norm for American military installations in Japan and Europe. In June , a U.
Army study found that out of every 1, soldiers in Korea were infected with VD, compared to per 1, worldwide. Korean and U. Once in custody at the Monkey House, the women were inspected, shot up with penicillin supplied by the U. Choi Hee-shin, a year-old community organizer who grew up in Dongducheon, explained how the building got its name. Many of the women overdosed, and some of them died, she said; a few of them are buried in a nearby graveyard built especially for sex workers.
The plight of women confined within these medical jails is the subject of a chilling graphic on the wall. The painting depicts the Monkey House and a giant vaginal inspection tool in front of a replica of a renowned image of three service members from the U. For anyone even casually versed in the long-standing U. The U. Militarized prostitution and the subjugation of women around U. While in the U.
Yet, outside of places like Dongducheon, where activists and artists have memorialized the struggles of South Korean camp-town women, their searing and sometimes violent experiences in the industry are a distant memory, much like the Korean War itself. This is, after all, a youthful, male-dominated society with a strong nationalist streak. Their arguments for reparations are based on a landmark lawsuit filed in by Ha and the Seoul-based Lawyers for a Democratic Society on behalf of former sex workers.
