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In January, I was outlining an article I hoped to write about a recent judgment by a South Korean court ordering Japan to pay compensation for atrocities committed during the Second World War against “comfort women,” women and girls who were transported to war-front “comfort stations” to provide sexual services to soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army. The women were taken by force or entrapped by deception in many countries in and beyond Asia, but a large number came from Korea, which, at the time, was a colony of Japan. Estimates of the number of victims have ranged widely, from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. On January 23rd, Japan announced that the Korean court’s judgment, which ordered a compensation of ninety-one thousand and eight hundred dollars to be paid to each of the twelve Korean comfort women who were plaintiffs in the case (seven of whom had died since it was filed, in 2013), was “extremely regrettable and absolutely unacceptable.” Japan said that it was not subject to Korea’s jurisdiction and considered the matter to have been previously settled. I was ruminating on how legal decisions relating to Second World War crimes against humanity might help resolve or aggravate historical traumas that seem impossible to leave in the past—in part, because they have been mired in waves of conflict and denial about the truth of what happened.
On January 31st, I began to receive messages from students and alumni of Harvard Law School, where I am a professor, about a longtime colleague of mine, J.Mark Ramseyer, a corporate-law specialist in Japanese legal studies. I knew him slightly, as an unassuming man in his late sixties who had ridden bikes with my husband and once advised us on what Japanese knives to buy. A child and grandchild of American Mennonite missionaries in Asia, he grew up in Japan. I knew that his scholarly contributions had included debunking conventional wisdom about the postwar Japanese economy.
The students and alumni wrote to tell me that Ramseyer had become front-page news in South Korea, owing to two recent articles he had written that challenged the historical consensus on comfort women. Ramseyer had made his views clear in “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” an article published online, in December, by the peer-reviewed journal International Review of Law and Economics (and forthcoming in print, this March), and in an op-ed published on January 12th in Japan Forward, an English-language Web site of Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper known for its conservative-nationalist bent. Read together, their message was unmistakable: the comfort-women system was not one in which Korean women were forced, coerced, and deceived into sexual servitude and confined under threat of violence. Ramseyer called that account “pure fiction.” Instead, he claimed that Korean comfort women “chose prostitution” and entered “multi-year indenture” agreements with entrepreneurs to work at war-front “brothels” in China and Southeast Asia. Purporting to use game theory, he said that the economic structure of the contracts reflected that the sex work was voluntarily chosen. “Prostitutes have followed armies everywhere, and they followed the Japanese army in Asia,” he wrote.
The news of Ramseyer’s article had been reported favorably in Japan, and then made its way to Korea and across the globe. It was a controversy that was not merely academic but that could potentially affect the troubled diplomatic relations between Japan and Korea, and also the delicate role played by the United States as their mutual ally. In the U.S., two members of Congress tweeted that Ramseyer’s claims were “disgusting,” and the State Department affirmed that “the trafficking of women for sexual purposes by the Japanese military during World War II was an egregious violation of human rights.” I understood that messages about Ramseyer were being sent to me, specifically, because I was the first Asian-American woman, and the first and only ethnic Korean, to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. I was born in Seoul, and my parents were refugees from their ancestral home, in North Korea, during the Korean War. At least one alumnus wrote to say that, because of my position, ethnicity, feminism, and writing on matters of justice, my silence was “complicity.”
After I spent time digesting my colleague’s reasoning, I spoke with him to say that we were about to have a public disagreement, but that I would not be joining or encouraging any possible calls for institutional penalty for his exercise of academic freedom to engage in scholarship or express his opinion. I posted a brief critique of Ramseyer’s arguments on social media, explaining that contract analysis assumes voluntary bargaining by free agents, and that when sex is mandatory, without the option to refuse or walk away, it cannot fairly be described as contractual. I was confident that he would not have described it as such if he believed comfort women’s accounts of having been conscripted and confined by force, threats, deception, and coercion. It seemed to me that his view reflected a prior choice not to credit those accounts because he deemed them inconsistent, or, as he wrote, “self-interested” and “uncorroborated.” I noticed, however, that he did choose to credit Japanese government denials, even where they contradicted other statements by the government. Trying to read my colleague’s work most generously, I thought his views might be a product of a skepticism of generally accepted wisdom that had informed his academic career. I approached the matter in the vein of criticism and disagreement over facts, logic, and interpretation, regarding a subject that triggered strong emotions around nationalism and human rights. I expected that scholars, by delving into Ramseyer’s research, would be able to further assess the accuracy of his claims; I could not have imagined how straightforward and yet how mystifying that work would prove to be.
Despite how easy it may be to reduce the issue to a conflict between Korea and Japan, victim and perpetrator, or women and men, historians have carefully explored the features and meanings of the comfort-women system, which involved several hundred comfort stations in war-torn Asia, individuals of many nationalities, and myriad experiences. Scholars have debated the precise role that the Japanese military played, along with private recruiters, in procuring the women. In South Korea, reckoning with the role of native recruiters in entrapping fellow-Koreans, and with impoverished families in allowing their girls to be taken, has been difficult, to say the least. There have been debates about whether the phrase “sex slavery,” given its common associations with chattel slavery, best captures the non-chattel situation of abuse and rape in brutal confinement. Over decades, historians have determined that there was a range of force or coercion used against comfort women, but that violence and threats were endemic. By contrast, Ramseyer’s statements seemed intent on flattening the complexity down to a plain denial: Korean comfort women went to the war front as voluntary prostitutes.
The end of Japanese colonialism in Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and the Western Pacific, following the Empire’s surrender to the U.S. at the conclusion of the Second World War, began seven decades of recrimination, apology, and denial over Japan’s wartime atrocities. Japan recognized Korea’s independence in a peace treaty with the Allied Powers, signed in San Francisco, in 1951. In 1965, a treaty between South Korea and Japan normalized their relations, and the countries agreed that “the problems concerning property, rights, and interests” of each “have been settled completely and finally,” and that “no claims shall be made with respect to the measures relating” to them. The comfort women were not specifically mentioned, which led to later conflict about whether their claims had indeed been settled.
For decades, the issue of comfort women was not widely discussed in Korea, the society of which stigmatized and ostracized sexual-assault victims. But, by the early nineties, the survivors had begun to share their experiences publicly. In 1993, Japan issued the watershed Kono Statement, which admitted the Japanese military’s involvement in the comfort stations and in recruiting women “against their own will,” and said that “they lived in misery at comfort stations under a coercive atmosphere.” Japan extended “sincere apologies and remorse,” and promised to “face squarely the historical facts” with “firm determination never to repeat the same mistake by forever engraving such issues in our memories through the study and teaching of history.” But after Prime Minister Shinzō Abe took office, in 2006, Japan appeared to back away from the Kono Statement’s apologetic stance. Under Abe, the environment in Japan became “inhospitable to objective historical inquiry” on the subject of comfort women, as Alexis Dudden, a historian of modern Japan and Korea at the University of Connecticut, put it. A key example was an attempt by the Japanese Foreign Ministry, in 2014, to pressure McGraw Hill to erase several paragraphs on comfort women from one of its world-history textbooks; the publisher refused, citing scholars’ work in establishing historical facts. Abe lamented the outcome, saying, “This kind of textbook is being used in the United States, as we did not protest the things we should have, or we failed to correct the things we should have.”
In 2015, twenty historians in the U.S. (including my New Yorker colleague Jelani Cobb) published a letter in the magazine of the American Historical Association expressing “dismay at recent attempts by the Japanese government to suppress statements in history textbooks” about comfort women. They compared Japan’s efforts to erase Second World War atrocities to American education boards’ efforts to “rewrite school textbooks to obscure accounts of African American slavery.” One of the signatories was Andrew Gordon, a historian of modern Japan at Harvard University. Later that year, Gordon and Dudden were among the organizers of a separate letter about comfort women, which was eventually signed by hundreds of scholars of Japanese studies at universities on several continents. Referring to the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the scholars wrote that “the evidence makes clear that large numbers of women were held against their will and subjected to horrific brutality,” and that “only careful weighing and contextual evaluation of every trace of the past can produce a just history.” The scholars defended “the freedom of historical inquiry” and called upon governments to do the same.
Meanwhile, in South Korea, resentment about Japan’s attempts to downplay its responsibility had been building, sometimes hardening into intolerance of anything short of a purist story of the Japanese military kidnapping Korean virgins for sex slavery at gunpoint. In 2015, a Korean academic named Park Yu-ha was sued civilly by comfort women for defamation, and criminally indicted by Korean prosecutors, for the publication of a book that explored the role of Koreans in recruiting the women and the loving relationships that some comfort women developed with Japanese soldiers while they were confined in a “slavelike condition.” The book did not, as some have claimed, absolve Japan of responsibility or deny the comfort women’s brutal victimization. Gordon, the Harvard historian of modern Japan, signed onto a letter with sixty-six other scholars, in Japan and the U.S., expressing “great consternation and concern” at the South Korean government’s indictment of Park, and conveying appreciation for her book’s scholarly achievement. Park was ultimately found civilly liable, and was ordered to pay damages to comfort women; she was acquitted of the criminal defamation charges, with the trial court citing her academic freedom, but an appellate court overturned that verdict and fined her.
In 2015, Japan and Korea reached a new agreement, with the encouragement of the Obama Administration, in which Prime Minister Abe expressed “his most sincere apologies and remorse” to the comfort women. Japan contributed $8.3 million to a Korean fund to compensate comfort women, and the two governments promised to “refrain from accusing or criticizing each other regarding this issue in the international community.” Both sides said that the comfort-women issue was “resolved finally and irreversibly.” But the Korean comfort women maintain that their government made this deal without consulting them, in a betrayal by Park Geun-hye, the country’s first female President, who likely wished to obtain Japan’s apology and compensation before the remaining survivors died. The deal was further delegitimized in South Korea when President Park was removed from office, in 2017, and the new President, Moon Jae-in, said that his predecessor’s agreement “cannot solve the comfort women issue.” Meanwhile, Japan has furiously objected to the installation of comfort-women statues around the world: it filed a brief in a U.S. lawsuit that unsuccessfully sought the removal of a memorial in a Los Angeles suburb, and terminated Osaka’s sister-city relationship with San Francisco after a monument was installed there. Japan’s rhetoric has escalated since the Korean court’s decision ordering it to apologize and pay compensation. This month, new language appeared on the Web site of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, omitting mention of the Kono Statement and decrying “claims that can hardly be said to be based on historical facts, such as the allegations of ‘forceful taking away’ of comfort women and ‘sex slaves.’”
The politics of Japan and South Korea’s dispute are difficult to unravel, but the question of how Ramseyer had come to his conclusion about Korean comfort women turned out to be a separate confounding matter. Early this month, Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert, another Harvard historian, were among the academics who were invited to write a response to Ramseyer in International Review of Law and Economics, the journal that had published his article. (I, too, was invited.) Eckert and Gordon decided to work on a response together. Reviewing Ramseyer’s footnotes, they found that there were no contracts involving Korean women at wartime comfort stations cited, nor secondary sources detailing those contracts, nor even any third-party accounts that confirm the relevant terms. When they examined the one cited source that seemed as if it might lead to data about relevant contracts, from 1938, they found that it provided sample contracts for employment of a Japanese woman as a “barmaid”—“shakufu” in Japanese, a job understood to involve sex work. To know the meaning of a labor contract, one must know the nature of the labor, the pay, and the duration. But, from what Eckert and Gordon could tell from their tracking of Ramseyer’s sources, none led to information about the terms of the contracts, written or oral, with Korean women.
Eckert and Gordon did not think it was reasonable to infer, from sample prewar or wartime prostitution contracts for Japanese women, that Korean women entered similarly termed or structured contracts for sex work serving the Japanese military at the front. The historians also noted that, even assuming Korean women or their families had entered contracts for the women to work at comfort stations, they may not have known the sexual purpose for which they were being recruited—in which case, any contracts could not be considered voluntary. Eckert and Gordon explained, in a statement, that in the decades leading up to the Second World War the term “comfort station” (“ianjo,” in Japanese, and “wianso,” in Korean) would not necessarily have communicated a sexual meaning, having been used in both Japanese and Korean newspapers of the period to refer to such things as recreation areas in municipal parks, a hotel, a shelter for children, and a hot-springs spa. Gordon also shared with me his translation of an article from 1940 in a major Japanese newspaper, which reported on a Japanese woman who travelled to northern China based on a recruiting ad for a “comfort woman,” and who was surprised to learn, upon arrival, the true nature of the work; the author of the article assumed that the reader, too, would not have known that “comfort woman” meant sex worker.
Determining that it wasn’t possible to respond to Ramseyer’s empirical claims without being able to examine the evidence, Eckert and Gordon wrote to the journal’s editors to say that there was a “problem of academic integrity” and to request a retraction of Ramseyer’s article. Within days, the journal issued an “Expression of Concern,” alerting readers that “concerns have been raised regarding the historical evidence” in the article, and that the “claims are currently being investigated.”
When I spoke to Ramseyer for this article, he said, “I don’t have any Korean contracts.” He further explained that he was “building on” an article he’d written in 1991 about indentured-servitude contracts for prostitution in prewar Japan, based on “vast amounts of discussion in historical records.” That article on prewar prostitution did not address war-front sex work during the Second World War or Korean comfort women. Ramseyer told me, “I thought it would be cool if we could get the contracts” for Korean comfort women. “But I haven’t been able to find it. Certainly you’re not going to find it.” Because he’d argued in the 1991 article that Japanese prewar prostitution-indenture contracts were largely for voluntary labor rather than “slavery,” I gathered he thought that, if Korean women had similar contracts for work in wartime comfort stations, that labor could also be characterized as voluntary rather than sex slavery.
