In his online lecture on the comfort women issue, Seoul National University professor emeritus of economics Lee Young-hoon next turned from a discussion of Korea under Japanese rule to Korea during the 17th—part of a long period when it was governed by the Chosun Dynasty. In his diary, Park writes of the women who shared his bed as he journeyed north.
After he arrived at his post, Park was provided with a kisaeng , designated as his local wife while he was stationed in the area. Professor Lee gave detailed evidence, quoting from written sources, of the repeated sexually-driven abductions carried out by the yangban —the group of literary and military officials who ruled South Korea—against official kisaeng , servants, and other women.
Lee then turned to research conducted on the marital relationships between yangban and servants in Gangwon Province from to It was not until the modern period that a stable family system became fixed among the middle class. There were many cases in which common people sold their daughters off as prostitutes.
There were reading rooms for prostitutes in Andong, in Gyeongsangbuk Province, and reading rooms for kisaeng in Pyongyang. The common people sold their daughters in droves wherever there were many yangban. The comfort women were an extension of the heavy human trafficking that took place in Gyeongsangbuk during the Chosun Dynasty.
The use of violence to control the common people and servants, as well as poverty among the servants and commoners, was the worst wherever the yangban were the most numerous. As a result, it became virtually impossible for maidservants to set up normal, ethical households, and many were forced to sell their daughters into prostitution. Lee then shifts the debate over the Japanese control of the Korean Peninsula.
