ABSTRACT
Prostitution tourism to South Korea in the early 1970s was a third corporate activity emerging in the high growth era that facilitated salaried men's sexual access to working class women. In these years, large numbers of Japanese white collar men prostituted South Korean women as hostesses, called kisaeng, either during business trips to Korea or as part of package tours awarded as bonuses by Japanese companies to their employees as prizes for reaching sales targets. Tightening profit margins in the late 1960s forced Japanese companies and their sponsoring state to look overseas for opportunities to acquire market share, negotiate arrangements for direct foreign investment, and secure cheap sources of labour and goods. Even before this, moreover, the Japanese imperial government enacted a law in colonial Korea that legalised prostitution soon after it assumed control over the country in 1910.
