Host states competed to supply sex workers for GI trade

Evidence

There was indeed considerable competition for GI dollars in Okinawa, South Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. In Okinawa, prostitution was legal through the end of the U.S. occupation in 1972. Within three months of the start of the Korean War, Okinawan authorities created the Yaejima Approved Prostitution Zone, and by 1969, 7,400 women—about 2 percent of all Okinawan females between ten and sixty years old—were involved in prostitution around the bases. Meanwhile, the U.S. war in Vietnam helped transform Thailand’s Pattaya Beach into one of the world’s largest red-light districts. It was a favored spot for R&R, or, as some called it, I&I—intoxication and intercourse. When the military withdrew from South Vietnam, it left behind an estimated seven hundred thousand sex workers. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 487

Categorization

• XREF: The 700,000 sex workers left in South Vietnam and Thailand’s Pattaya Beach as an R&R zone connects to the broader ‘soft power and exploitation’ pattern across the reader’s basing literature.