1953 Jul 21 - "Country Girls Lured into Prostitution"

This July 7, 1953 article from the South Korean newspaper Donga Ilbo describes a typical means by which innocent Korean girls were lured into prostitution. That is, they are promised a good job, put into debt, and then forced to pay back the debt by working as prostitutes.

When I was in South Korea in the navy in the late 1970s, the typical method was to put ads promising high-paying waitress jobs in cheap magazines. When girls showed up, they were given a furnished apartment to put them in high-interest debt, which their waitress salaries would never be able to pay off, which forced them into prostitution. At that time a person could not walk away from debt or declare personal bankruptcy.
Here is my translation of the article.

Country Girls Lured into Prostitution 

Go Ok-i (高玉伊), a 53-year-old woman who lives at No. 83 on 3rd Street in the Cho Ryang-dong area of  Hanmok City, was operating a comfort woman business for UN servicemen until she suspended operations because of financial difficulties. Then on the 3rd of this month, with the intention of reopenning her business, Ms. Go had her maid, Im Mi-ja (林미子), lure five virgins, including 15-year-old Gang Pil-yeon (姜必連) of Jinju City (at No. 888 in Tongbong-dong), to Busan with promises of getting them jobs in the 34th Military Hospital. 

Telling the girls that they would need to wear "high-class" clothes if they expected to be hired, Ms. Go gave each of the six girls an advance of 5,000 hwan worth of high-class clothing with the idea of putting them to work as comfort women. However, she was detected by police authorities prior to that, and on the 7th, Ms. Go and Ms. Im were undergoing intense questioning at the Investigation Section of the Busan Police Department.