Harvard professor rejects consensus on ‘comfort women’

A Harvard law professor’s contention that the so-called ‘comfort women’ were prostitutes with the capacity to negotiate high wages for their sexual labours has become the subject of an international controversy, writes Elizabeth Redden for Inside Higher Ed.

Scholars have cried foul, accusing J Mark Ramseyer, the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, of overlooking extensive evidence that the imperial Japanese military forced or coerced women and girls into an organised system of sexual slavery to service Japanese soldiers before and during World War II. Control over the historical narrative regarding the euphemistically named ‘comfort women’, most of whom were Korean, remains an issue of contention between the governments of Japan and South Korea, as conservative Japanese politicians have embarked in recent years on efforts to deny state responsibility and rewrite textbooks.

Ramseyer wrote an op-ed in a Japanese newspaper describing the “comfort-women-sex-slave story” as “pure fiction”. He also published an article in an academic journal, the International Review of Law and Economics, characterising the comfort women as prostitutes, in effect rational economic actors who were able to negotiate and command high wages for their sexual labours.
Full report on the Inside Higher Ed site