To the editors of the International Review of Law and Economics (IRLE),
It has come to our attention that your journal has accepted for publication (March 2021)
Professor Mark Ramseyer’s article, “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War.” We the signatories
wish to submit the following rebuttal to this article and sincerely hope that you consider
accepting our position.
The entire premise of Professor Mark Ramseyer’s forthcoming article in the journal is
widely acknowledged to be wrong by numerous scholars who have studied this issue.
We the co-signers of this statement strongly object to the article. Professor Ramseyer,
Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, has presented anerroneous analysis of the Japanese military’s war crimes in World War II. He claims that the“comfort women” were consenting prostitutes rather than sex slaves and victims of abduction
and rape. His claims are misleading, inaccurate, and at odds with overwhelming historicalevidence and eye-witness testimonies.1
The term “comfort women”2 is a euphemism for the more than 200,0003 female sexslaves whom the Japanese military kidnapped, rounded up, coerced, lured, tricked and trafficked
into sexual slavery during the Asia-Pacific War between 1931 and 1945. The so-called “comfortstations” were run by private operators to provide “comfort” to soldiers, and were supervised andmaintained by the Japanese military, or run by the Japanese military, for the exclusive use of theJapanese army. The term “comfort” is insulting to women and girls, and the term “women” is anequally inaccurate in that a great number of the victims were children, even according to thelegal definition of adulthood in Japan at the time.54Girls as young as eleven-years-old, or twelve by the Asian count6 were kidnapped,coerced, deceived, and held in “comfort stations” to provide sexual services for Japanese soldiers
before they were shipped out to battle. As any scholar with a legal background should know, it isimpossible for anyone that age to have consented to this. There were girls who had not evenstarted menstruating.7 Sex with underage girls is not a contractual agreement; it is criminal rape.
Professor Ramseyer argues that the responsibility was on brothel keepers as opposed to theJapanese military; however, this is also inaccurate. The involvement of the Japanese military inthe transportation of underage girls constituted child sex-trafficking.
Furthermore, the widespread abduction of girls and women from occupied regions into
comfort stations was a war crime and a crime against humanity, although regrettably the Tokyo
War Crimes Tribunal in 1946 did not prosecute any defendants for the systematic enslavement of
the comfort women, despite extensive knowledge and documentation of these crimes after theWar had ended.8 With the passage in 2007 of Resolution 121, however, the U. S. House ofRepresentatives has called upon the Japanese government to “formally acknowledge, apologize,and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed
Forces’ coercion of young women into sexual slavery.” The passage of this Resolution, which
has assigned responsibility to Japan at the governmental level, is yet another fact that Professor
Ramseyer omits.

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Professor Ramseyer also deliberately ignores numerous works of respected scholars on
the subject of the Japanese military sexual slavery during the Pacific War and WWII, such as
Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War
II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Yuki Tanaka, Japan's Comfort Women: SexualSlavery and Prostitution during World War II and the U.S. Occupation (New York: Routledge,2002); Peipei Qiu, Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves(Oxford University Press, 2014); and Caroline Norma, The Japanese Comfort Women andSexual Slavery during the China and Pacific Wars (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015);and others.
We would like to request that Professor Ramseyer voluntarily withdraw his article andapologize to the few last survivors of the Japanese sexual slavery. If he does not withdraw thisarticle, the journal should either do so or, in the interests of historical accuracy and fairness,
publish any and all rebuttals.
1. Sangmie Choi Schellstede, ed., Comfort Women Speak, Testimony by Sex Slaves of theJapanese Military, New York/London: Holmes & Meier, 2000.
2. See Margaret Stetz and Bonnie B.C. Oh, eds. Legacies of Comfort Women of WorldWar II, New York & London: M.E. Sharpe, 2001.
3. This number as may be even greater if one includes the previously unrecorded story ofChina. See Peipei Qiu, The Chinese Comfort Women, London: Oxford University Press,2014.
4. UN Special Rapporteur Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy, in accordance with Commission on
Human Rights resolution 1994/45 . . .on the issue of military sexual slavery in wartime(italics added).
5. Margaret Stetz, emails to Bonnie Oh (2.2.21).
6. Twelve by the Asian system of counting.
7. Kim Yoon-sim, for example, has testified that she was captured two months before she
was thirteen, this makes her twelve by Asian counting and eleven by Western way. See Choi
Schellstede, Comfort Women Speak, p. 43.
8. In April 2007, Professor Yoshimi Yoshiaki uncovered Tokyo Trial documents that wereused for the sentencing of defendants for war crimes which were submitted by the Dutch
prosecutors and which clearly documented not only the forced nature of these comfortstations, but also proof of Japanese military involvement. See Hirofumi Hayashi, “Disputes
over the Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’ System and its Perception in History,” Annalsof the American Academy of Political Science, 617(1), 123-32.
[Co-signers, in alphabetical order of the last names]
Arlene Cohen, Associate. Prof of Library Science at the University of Guam (Ret).
Bruce Fulton, Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation, University ofBritish Columbia; co-translator of One Left, a translated first novel on comfort women inKorean.
Ju-Chan Fulton, Co-translator of One Left.
Nicola Henry, Associate Professor and Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow, Social and2

Global Studies Centre, RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia) and author of War andRape: Law, Memory and Justice, 2012.
Jinah Kim, Associate Professor, California State University, Northridge, Author, Postcolonial
Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas, 2019.
Miho Kim, Contract Researcher, Kwansei Gakuin University; Lecturer, San Francisco StateUniversity.
Phyllis Kim, Activist, Executive Director, Comfort Women Action for Redress and Education(CARE).
Ross King, Professor of Korean and Director, Centre for Korean Research, Department of AsianStudies, University of British Columbia.
Eunah Lee, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, St. Joseph’s College, New York.
Jungsil Lee, Chair, Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, Inc. (WCCW),
Co-editor with Dennis Halpin, Comfort Women, A Movement. . . ,2020.
Bonnie B.C. Oh, Distinguished Professor of Korean Studies (Ret.), Georgetown University, Coeditor with Margaret D. Stetz, Legacies of Comfort Women of WWII, 2001.
Lucy Paik, MD, FAAP, Pediatric Practice at Chicago, Chair for the comfort women statue
erecting committee.
Peipei Qiu, Co-author with Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei, Chinese Comfort Women, 2014.
Elizabeth W. Son, Associate Professor of Theater, Northwestern University, Author, Embodied
Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance, and Transpacific Redress, 2018.
Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor ofHumanities, University of Delaware, Co-editor, Legacies of Comfort Women of WWII,
2001
Ji-Yeon Yuh, Associate Professor and founder of Asian American Studies, Northwestern
University, Author of Beyond the Shadow of Camptown, 2002.

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