In December 2020, the Harvard Law School professor J. Mark Ramseyer published a paper titled “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War” regarding “comfort women”—the euphemism used by imperial Japan to describe the women, the majority of whom were Korean, held in military sex slavery during World War II.
In the companion op-ed published in Japan Forward, Ramseyer argued that the comfort women in fact “chose prostitution” by entering into a contract, and the economic structure of those contracts indicated that women voluntarily chose sex work. Since then, Ramseyer has been blasted for historical revisionism and shoddy scholarship. The coercive nature of imperial Japan’s military sex slavery is well established through United Nations investigation and decades of scholarship. Although Ramseyer purported to analyze the contract that the comfort women entered into, by his own admission he never reviewed an actual contract involving a comfort woman.
