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Kisaeng Tell: Uncovering the revival of colonial-era sexual exploitation in 1970s South Korea
Paperback
General SociologyKorean History
Publisher Price: $14.99
Publisher: Elan W. Zohar
Published: May 26 2026
Pages: 126
Weight: 0.39
Height: 0.30 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The story of Korea's comfort women-the tens of thousands forced into sexual servitude under Imperial Japan-has, after decades of silence, been brought into the light. Their suffering has been increasingly documented, memorialized, and debated across the world. But a strikingly parallel system of exploitation that emerged just a few decades later, operating openly on the streets of Seoul and in the resort towns of Jeju, has been almost entirely ignored.
Kisaeng Tell confronts this silence. In this groundbreaking work, Elan Zohar traces the state-sponsored kisaeng prostitution industry of 1970s South Korea, revealing how colonial dispositions of sexual exploitation did not end with liberation in 1945. Instead, it was inherited, repackaged, and deployed in the service of economic development. Young, poor women were funneled into a government-backed tourism machine designed to attract Japanese businessmen on corporate sex tours; the collective kisaeng sacrifice was rebranded as patriotic duty by a regime that had learned its playbook from the very empire it claimed to have left behind.
Drawing on Korean-language government records, media archives, and survivor accounts, Zohar dismantles the comforting assumption of a postcolonial break. He argues that while the actors changed-Japanese soldiers became salarymen and imperial coercion gave way to economic pressure-the structures endured, sustained by a mutually accommodating relationship in which economic partnership took precedence over historical reckoning. This is the history that South Korea has yet to confront, that Japan has yet to acknowledge, and that the wider postwar order made possible.
Zohar's thesis is well written, wisely structured, superbly researched, and convincingly argued. It is sustained by an underlying 'rage' that, while never compromising its scholarly rigor, gives the work a compelling meaning within academia. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is one of the best senior theses I have read in my eleven years at Princeton.
Federico Marcon, Princeton University Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies
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