“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.
Second World War crimes against humanity
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.
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
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.
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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. 역할으
For decades, the issue of comfort women was not widely discussed in Korea, the society of which stigmatized and ostracized sexual-assault victims.
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, 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.
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.
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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.
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There have been debates about whether the phrase “sex slavery,”
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. [?]
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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;
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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.
Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert
there were no contracts involving Korean women at wartime comfort stations cited, nor secondary sources detailing those contracts, nor even any third-party accounts
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.
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.
a young Japanese girl who went to Borneo to work as a prostitute: “When Osaki
The recruiter did not try to trick her
You liar!”
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Eckert and Gordon have spoken out in defense of the academic freedom to follow evidence to uncomfortable or debatable places, including on the topic of comfort women. They and other historians I spoke to objected to the persecution of Park Yu-ha
In the researchers’ view, the key issue is scholarly responsibility.
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a public statement decrying a “witch-hunt” against him, signed by fifteen Korean individuals.
On February 8th, six people affiliated with Japanese institutions, who identified themselves as historians,
Mary Elizabeth Berry, a Japanese historian
David Weinstein, a professor of Japanese economics at Columbia,
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I defend the right of academics to express unpopular opinions or views with which I strongly disagree.
But the Ramseyer matter has revealed a strong consensus that academic freedom comes with the responsibility,
Ramseyer has framed his work on comfort women as that of a debunker coming to refute what he called a “pure fiction” adopted by an academic consensus obsessed with the “trifecta” of “sexism, racism, and imperialism.”
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Lee Yong-soo, who was conscripted as a comfort woman at fifteen and is now in her nineties
The e-mails even claimed that Grandma Lee was a “fake comfort woman,” and that we at Harvard should boycott her event.
“I hate the crime but I don’t hate the people,” she said.
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