Harvard professor sparks outrage with claims about Japan's 'comfort women'

Academics reject J Mark Ramseyer’s claim women were not forced into sexual slavery during second world war

Justin McCurry in Tokyo and agencies
Mon 8 Mar 2021 11.24 GMT

A Harvard University professor has sparked outrage among fellow academics and campaigners after claiming that women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military had chosen to work in wartime brothels.

J Mark Ramseyer, a professor of Japanese legal studies at Harvard Law School, challenged the accepted narrative that as many as 200,000 “comfort women” – mostly Koreans, but also Chinese, south-east Asians and a small number of Japanese and Europeans – were coerced or tricked into working in military brothels between 1932 and Japan’s defeat in 1945.

In an academic paper published online late last year, Ramseyer claimed the women were sex workers who had voluntarily entered into contracts – a view supported by Japanese ultra-conservatives seeking to whitewash their country’s wartime atrocities.

The article, titled Contracting for sex in the Pacific War, was due to appear in this month’s issue of the International Review of Law and Economics, but the issue has been suspended as Ramseyer’s claims come under increasing scrutiny. The journal issued an “expression of concern” and said the piece was under investigation.

In a separate article for the English-website of a rightwing Japanese newspaper, Ramseyer rejected the widely accepted account of the comfort women system as “pure fiction”, claiming that the Japanese army “did not dragoon Korean women to work in its brothels”.

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