Harvard-Yenching Institute Lunch Talk
Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Korea Institute

Jungwon Jin, Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica; HYI Visiting

Scholar

Chair/Discussant: Elizabeth Remick, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Tufts

University

About the Talk 
Despite its wide practice, the sex trade and sex industry in Taiwan and Korea had never been put under

 governmental control before Japanese colonial rule. In the early stages of colonization, the Japanese

colonizers imposed their own laws and regulations on the two newly acquired colonies of Taiwan and

 Korea. Legislation stipulated that brothels and prostitutes had to be registered, and prostitutes had to

undergo regular checks for sexually transmitted diseases.
Previous studies on the history of colonial Korea have widely agreed that the traditional practices of the

sex industry in Chos?n Korea underwent significant changes during Japanese rule. However, the issue

of how state-regulated prostitution policies influenced Taiwanese society and shaped its sex industries

 requires further discussion.
In an attempt to understand how the Japanese state-regulated prostitution system was implemented in

colonial Taiwan, this talk focuses particularly on the emergence and spread of Korean prostitutes and

 brothels across Taiwan from the 1920’s onwards. By exploring the process of one-way migration of

Korean prostitutes to Taiwan, the talk seeks to bring to light the different survival strategies of Korean

brothel operators in Taiwan and Korea, and to offer new insights on the unique traits of the Taiwanese

sex-trade market compared to Korea.