ISSN 1936-5349 (print)
ISSN 1936-5357 (online)

HARVARD
JOHN M. OLIN CENTER FOR LAW, ECONOMICS, AND BUSINESSCOMFORT WOMEN AND THE PROFESSORS
J. Mark Ramseyer

Discussion Paper No. 995
03/2019
Harvard Law School
Cambridge, MA 02138

This paper can be downloaded without charge from:The Harvard John M. Olin Discussion Paper Series:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center

JEL: J47, K12 K36, N15, N35, N45
Key words: Prostitution, Indentured Servitude, Japan, Korea
Draft of March 13, 2019
J. Mark Ramseyer
Harvard University
ramseyer@law.harvard.edu

Comfort Women and the Professors

By J. Mark Ramseyer*

Abstract: We in the West have embraced an odd "narrative." The Japanese army of the
1930s and 1940s, we write, forcibly drafted 200,000 mostly Korean teenage girls into "rape camps"
called "comfort stations." Should anyone question the story, we summarily consign the person to"denier" status.
This makes for a strange phenomenon. Only a few of the comfort women claim to havebeen forcibly recruited, and several of them had told a different story before the reparations
campaign against Japan began. A strongly leftist affiliate runs their nursing home, controls whomthey can see, and vilifies any woman who might say anything else. In fact, no one has ever locatedany documentary evidence that the Japanese military forcibly recruited any Korean woman into a
comfort station. And when Korean academics question the orthodox account, their own government
sometimes prosecutes them for criminal defamation -- indeed, sent one heterodox professor last fallto six months in prison.

* Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, Harvard University. I gratefully acknowledge the generous
and helpful comments and suggestions of Elizabeth Berry, Yoshitaka Fukui, Sheldon Garon, Il-Young Jung,
Mitsuhiko Kimura, Yoshiro Miwa, Jason Morgan, Minoru Nakazato, Jennifer Ramseyer, Frances Rosenbluth, Richard
Samuels, Franziska Seraphim, Henry Smith, and Frank Upham.

Comfort Women: Page

It was early in the summer of 2015. A friend of mine in Tokyo wrote to ask what was goingon. Twenty historians had written a letter to the house organ for the American Historical
Association. They wanted to "express [their] dismay" at the "recent attempts by the Japanese
government to suppress statements in history textbooks." The disputed textbook was a world
history text used in Wisconsin high schools. The Japanese government was trying, the historians
continued, to sanitize the story of the "comfort women." These women had "suffered under abrutal system of sexual exploitation in the service of the Japanese imperial army during WorldWar II." "We stand with the many historians in Japan," the twenty proclaimed, "who have worked
to bring to light the facts about this and other atrocities of World War II" (Dudden 2015a).
A pile-on followed. Within three months, over 180 professors (many of them specialists
in Japanese studies) had posted their support. By some accounts the number would soon soar past450. Despite the widespread violence in wartime, these scholars wrote, "the 'comfort women'system was distinguished by its large scale and systematic management under the military, and by
its exploitation of young, poor, and vulnerable women ..." The "evidence makes clear," they
insisted, "that large numbers of women were held against their will and subjected to horrificbrutality" (Open Letter 2015; see Fujioka 2015).
Japanese scholar Naoko Kumagai (2015; see also Morgan 2015) soon wrote in to the AHA
newsletter to complain. The "statement that as many as 200,000 women age 14 to 20 were forcibly
recruited, conscripted, or dragooned by the Japanese army [was] unrealistic in view of the Japanesemilitary's quite limited material capabilities and strategic purposes," she explained. When thegroup of twenty flatly condemned the government complaint "as censorship," they embodied "thespirit of censorship" themselves. "Not true," 14 of the 20 summarily replied. Hers was a "denialist
thesis." (Dudden 2015b).
By the end of the year, fifty more Japanese scholars wrote to complain (Multiple 2015).
Several of them teaching at top-tier (and generally left-leaning) schools, they observed that the
text book had claimed that the government "presented the women to the troops as a gift from theEmperor." It had asserted that Japanese troops "massacred large numbers of comfort women" atthe end of the war to "cover up the operation." Tales like these, the Japanese scholars replied, "arecompletely without supporting historical evidence." The American historians had titled their letter"standing with historians of Japan." Think again, wrote the Japanese scholars. The "20 American
historians would never be able to find a single Japanese academician with whom they claim to
stand."The letters involved a high-school world history textbook putblished by McGraw-Hill. The
textbook authors had written (Bentley & Ziegler 2011):
The Japanese army forcibly recruited, conscripted, and dragooned as many as two
hundred thousand women age fourteen to twenty to serve in military brothels, called"comfort houses" or "consolation centers." The army presented the women to the troops

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as a gift from the emperor, and the women came from Japanese colonies such as Korea,
Taiwan, and Manchuria and from occupied territories in the Philippines and elsewhere insoutheast Asia. The majority of the women came from Korea and China.
Once forced into this imperial prostitution service, the "comfort women" catered to
between twenty and thirty men each day. Stationed in war zones, the women often
confronted the same risks as soldiers, and many became casualties of war. Others were
killed by Japanese soldiers, especially if they tried to escape or contracted venereal diseases.
At the end of the war, soldiers massacred large numbers of comfort women to cover up theoperation
This 21st century cross-national exchange presents a puzzle: why several hundred scholars,
many of them specialists in the field, would sign the account they did. Soldiers can do appalling
things to civilians, especially when they are losing. By most accounts, the Japanese army did its
share of appalling things. But that the army did appalling things in the abstract does not mean it
did these specific appalling things.
The facts are more prosaic -- as I explain in detail below. The Japanese army had a problem.
It did not lack for brothels. Prostitutes follow armies everywhere, and they had followed theJapanese army in the 1930s and 1940s. The problem was medical: these local prostitutes sufferedfrom very high levels of venereal disease. If their soldiers were going to frequent brothels, thecommand at least wanted them in healthy brothels.
Toward that end -- not toward charity but toward maintaining a more deadly military force-- the military imported the standard Japanese and Korean licensing system. Brothels andprostitutes registered with it. Designated physicians conducted weekly medical examinations.
Brothels required condoms, and prostitutes were told to refuse clients who balked. Both clientsand prostitutes were to wash with disinfectant after every encounter.
Brothel owners (not the military) hired the bulk of the new prostitutes, and hired most ofthem from Japan and Korea. They recruited them (i.e., the women from Japan and Korea; mostscholars agree that the military did forcibly recruit women in enemy territories like China) underindenture contracts that coupled a large advance with one or two year terms. Until the later yearsof the war, women served their terms or paid off their debts early, and returned home.
These facts (as more fully explained below) make for a boring story. But it is the accountthat the evidence supports. Documentary evidence for the "sex slave" narrative more popular in
the West simply does not exist. 1 This eminently boring story is the account that virtually all
Japanese historians (both left and right -- this is emphatically not a "right-wing" story) endorse.
And it is the account that many Korean historians would publicly endorse too -- were it not for thedomestic Korean politics I detail below.
I. The Women Themselves
A. Introduction:
The conventional English-language account of the "comfort stations" turns entirely on
narratives told by the most prominent of the surviving "comfort women. Even some rudimentary
checks might have raised questions. The 20 historians allowed that "[h]istorians continue to debate
whether the numbers of women exploited were in the tens of thousands or the hundreds of1

Unless, of course, one defines all prostitution as sex slavery. See, e.g., Norma (2016: 15): "It is an aim of
the book to forge an understanding of prostitution in peacetime as a system of 'civilian sexual slavery' in the same way
prostitution in wartime is now understood by the United Nations as 'military sexual slavery.'"3

Comfort Women: Page

thousands and what precise role the military played in their procurement" -- though when Kumagai
tried to debate exactly those points, 14 of the 20 summarily dismissed her as "denialist."
The Wisconsin textbook (Bentley & Ziegler 2011: 853) tells its readers that the military"dragooned" "two hundred thousand women [sic] age 14 to 20" (a Chinese source ratchets thenumber to 400,000; Huang 2012: 206). That is a lot of teenage girls for a country the size of Korea.
In 1935 there were 1,048,514 Korean girls between the age of 15 and 19 (Chosen 1935: 24).
Apparently the American scholars would have the Japanese military turning one out of every five
Korean girls into a prostitute.
The textbook tells its readers that these 200,000 women had sex with 20 to 30 men a day("even one hundred times a day," writes one scholar; Yang 1997: 51, 60). Historian Nobukatsu
Fujioka (2015) tried the arithmetic: if 200,000 women had sex with 20 to 30 men a day, that cameto 4 to 6 million daily couplings. Even in 1943, he noted, the Japanese Army stationed only 1
million soldiers abroad (Fujioka; see Watanabe 2014 on total force). This does not, as he put it,
leave much time for fighting.
B. The Narratives:
Several of the comfort women who recount the narratives, however, present more basic
problems. Only a small subset of the women told the stories on which the conventional accountdepends. Yet as anthropologist C. Sarah Soh (2008), historian Ikuhito Hata (1999) and several
others have pointed out, some of these women have changed what they say. Yi Yong-su, forinstance, originally had told historians that she left home with a friend in the middle of the night.
The interview had taken place in the early 1990s, when Korean scholars were collecting thebiographies of surviving comfort women. Her friend had urged her to "[c]ome out quickly," shetold them, so she had "tiptoed out" and followed her friend. There she found a Japanese man who
gave her a "a red dress and a pair of leather shoes in a packet." So excited was she that she followed
him "readily," and "without any further thought" (Soh 2008: 12-13, 98-100; Howard 1995: 88; Yi
2018).
By the next decade, Yi joined the campaign to demand money and apologies from Japan,
and told a different story. In 2002, she visited the Diet and declared that "she had been taken away
at age 14 at bayonet-point." (Moto 2002). In 2007, she told the U.S. House of Representatives "thatshe had been kidnapped by Japanese soldiers." Shortly after that visit to the U.S., she added at aTokyo news conference that "Japanese soldiers had dragged her from her home, covering her
mouth so that she could not call to her mother" (Fackler 2007).
Kim Hak-sun had originally blamed her stepfather for her career in prostitution. She did
not like the man her mother had married. According to one of her accounts, her mother had
responded by selling her (KIH 2016a). According to another (perhaps simply adding detail), hermother had sent her to "foster parents" who trained her to become the Korean equivalent of ageisha (kisaeng). This foster father had run a comfort station. One day he disappeared, and she
became a comfort woman (Soh 2008: 127; Yi 2018). As the comfort-women movement ramped
up its pressure on Japan, however, Kim adopted a very different story: Japanese soldiers hadarrested her foster father during a trip to Beijing, and sent her to a comfort station (Howard 1995:
33).
Kim Sun-ok originally told those who asked that she had "had no childhood. I was soldfour times from the age of seven" (Soh 2008: 11). Recruiters would come "showing up at my home,coaxing my parents," she recalled. "I declared to my parents that I was not going anywhere .... I
begged them not to sell me again." Indeed, "I contemplated a variety of methods of killing myself."

4Comfort Women: Page

But her parents sold her anyway, and she landed in Manchurian comfort station. Nevertheless,when the U.N. Commission on Human Rights held hearings on the comfort women in 1996, she
testified to "U.N. interrogator Radhika Coomaraswamy ... that she was abducted by the Japanesemilitary" (Devine 2016, quoting Soh).
Like Kim Hak-sun, Kim Kun-ja started her career in comfort-women politics by blaming
her foster father. He had "sold" her, she recalled. She "hated the father more than the Japanesemilitary" (Soh 2008: 11; KIH 2016a). Nevertheless, in 2007 she told the U.S. House ofRepresentatives (Protecting 2007: 30) that the Japanese army had abducted her. She had lived ina house "in front of a train station," she now explained. At age 17, the family with whom she lived
had "sent [her] outside for an errand." There, she "was captured and taken away" on a train.
"[T]here were lots of soldiers" on the train, "and there were lots of women who were forcibly taken
away."For all our obsession with the "sex slave narrative," virtually no Western scholar other than
Sarah Soh has bothered to check the reliability of women involved. Instead, several scholars
forthrightly argue that any attempts to verify are off-limit -- not just tactless and impolite (which
they surely may be), but academically improper. Writes one (Thoma 2000: 29, 36), the "oral statusof [the] narrative" is "the very element that makes it radically transnational and feminist." To evenconsider checking its veracity, insists another (Yang 1997), would amount "to the trivialization of
the women's testimony." To suggest that the women might be lying would constitute the "age-old
strategy for discrediting [victims of sexual assault] by portraying them as somehow consenting toassaults" (O'Brian 2000: 10).
C. The Documentary Evidence:
For most of us, the problematic nature of the statements by the most prominent comfort
women puts the onus on the physical evidence: does the documentary trail confirm (or at least,
not contradict) the claim that the Japanese military forcibly recruited -- "dragooned," as the
Wisconsin textbook put it -- young Korean women? In truth, the documentary evidence does notexist.
When the Western scholars cite anyone, they cite activist historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi: inthe words of the original 20 historians, "the careful research of historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki inJapanese government archives and the testimonials of survivors throughout Asia have renderedbeyond dispute the essential features of a system that amounted to state-sponsored sexual slavery. "In fact, though, even Yoshimi (2013; Yoshimi 2000: 29) no longer claims the Japanese government
forced any Korean woman to work in a station. Instead, he details evidence of coercion only inenemy territory like China (claims no one contests).
Back in 1992, Yoshimi (see 2013: 58-59) had indeed announced to great fanfare that hehad located documentary proof of the government's involvement in recruiting comfort women. In
fact, what he had found were documents along the lines of the following memorandum from early
1938 (Gun'ianjo 1938):
Several matters requiring close attention have arisen with respect to the recruitmentof women from Japan for comfort stations located near operations relating to the China
incident. Some recruiters claim to have received the approval of the military. They
threaten to damage the good name of the military, and to create misunderstanding among
the general public. Some recruiters risk creating social problems by recruiting
unsystematically through the intervention of military journalists or sympathetic outsiders.
Some people have dealt with carelessly chosen recruiters, and they in turn have5Comfort Women: Pagetransformed recruitment into something close to kidnapping, and found themselves the
subject of arrests and police investigation. In the future, recruitment should be coordinatedthrough the local military, and recruiters should be selected carefully. In carrying out theiractivities, recruiters should keep any ties to the local police and military police confidential-- in order to maintain the good name of the military and minimize social problems.
The document does not suggest that the military forcibly recruited comfort women. It does
not suggest that it recruited comfort women at all. Instead, it shows that the government wanted
women who would staff approved brothels near its military posts. It indicates that the government
encouraged recruiters to hire women for the job. And it suggests that the government knew thatsome recruiters had been hiring women through false pretences.
At roughly the same time that the Army issued the memorandum above, the Home Ministryordered (Shina 1938):(a) For women traveling for the purpose of prostitution, approval shall be granted
only to those women heading to North and Central China who are currently working as
licensed or effective prostitutes, who are 21 years old or older, and who are free of venereal
and other infectious diseases ...
(b) When receiving the identification documents detailed in the preceding section,
the women should understand that they should immediately return to Japan upon the
conclusion of their provisional contract or when that completion is no longer necessary.
(c) Women intending to travel for the purpose of prostitution must apply to thepolice office for their identification documents in person.
(d) In issuing identification documents regarding women traveling for the purposeof prostitution, special care should be taken in investigating the labor contract and othermatters in order to insure that the transaction is not a sale of the woman or a case of
kidnapping.
For its comfort stations, the government wanted only women who understood exactly the job they
were accepting. It realized that some of its recruiters were cheating, and was trying to stop themwithout dismantling the entire licensing apparatus.
II. Prostitution in Prewar Japan and Korea
A. Introduction:
The Japanese military modeled the comfort stations on the licensed brothels in Japan. It
had already adapted the regime for Korea, Taiwan, and other areas either within its budding empire
or within areas where well-to-do expatriates had created informal Japanese communities. In the
1930s, the military adapted this regime for qualifying brothels near its military posts.
B. Japan
1. Licensed prostitutes. -- Prostitution had been a licensed industry in pre-war Japan. Table
the geisha, who sometimes but not always provided sex. In 1924, 50,100 licensed prostitutes(shogi) worked out of 11,500 licensed brothels in Japan (Fukumi 1928: 50-56, 178; Kusama 1930:
14-26). Most commonly, the licensed prostitutes worked under multi-year indenture contracts.
The brothel paid the woman (or her parents) a given amount upfront, and in exchange she agreed
to work for the shorter of (i) the time it took her to pay off the loan or (ii) the stated contractual
term (Fukumi 1928: 97-99, 115-16, 220; Kusama 1930: 283; Okubo 1906; Ito 1931: 229). The
mean upfront amount in the mid-1920s ranged from about 1000 to 1200 yen; the most common(70 to 80 percent of the contracts) term was six years. The brothel did not charge interest. Under

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the typical contract, the brothel took the first 2/3 to 3/4 of the revenue a prostitute generated. It
applied 60 percent of the remainder toward the loan repayment, and let the prostitute keep the rest
(Chuo 1926: 412-15; Kusama 1930: 206, 211; Fukumi 1928: 70).
In practice, the prostitutes repaid their loans in about three years and quit. Surely, historians
often insist, the brothels must have manipulated the charges for food and clothing to keep
prostitutes mired in perpetual debt. At least on a large scale, however, they did not do this.
Probably, the brothels -- established institutions with a large capital investment -- realized thatcheating on their initial contract would raise their future recruitment costs. Not only did thebrothels specifically promise a woman she could quit debt-free at the end of six years regardles of
the revenue she generated, they generally kept their promise.
If brothels manipulated charges or otherwise cheated on their terms to keep prostitutes
locked in debt, the number of licensed prostitutes should have stayed reasonably constant at least
up to age 30. The minimum age for licensed prostitutes was 18. In 1925, there were 737 licensed
Tokyo prostitutes aged 21, and 632 aged 22. There were only 515 aged 24, however, 423 age 25,
and 254 age 27 (Fukumi 1928: 58-59). Similarly, if brothels were keeping prostitutes locked in"debt slavery," the number of years in the industry should have stayed constant beyond six. Yetof 42,400 licensed prostitutes surveyed, 38 percent were in their second or third year, 25 percent
were in their fourth or 5th, and only 7 percent were in their 6th or 7th (Ito 1931: 208-11; Kusama
1930: 281). On a workforce of about 50,000 licensed prostitutes, 18,800 women registered as new
licensed prostitutes in 1922 and 18,300 de-registered (Yamamoto 1983: 388; Ito 1931: 211-13).
Consistent with a general tenure of about three years, one third of the work force replaced itself
every year (Keishi 1933: 96-98; Kusama 1930: 227-28).
Consider some simple calculations (Keishi 1933: 96-98; Kusama 1930: 227-28). In 1925,
customers made 3.74 million visits to the 4159 licensed prostitutes in Tokyo. Aside from payments
for food and drink, they spent 11.1 million yen. Of this amount, prostitutes kept 31 percent, or 3.4
million yen -- 655 yen per prostitute. Under the standard arrangement, the prostitute would haveapplied 60 percent of this amount (393 yen) toward the repayment of her loan, and kept the rest(262 yen). She would have repaid her initial loan of 1200 yen in about 3 years. The average adultfactory wage (both sexes; room and board not provided) in 1925 was 1.75 yen per day, and in 1935
was 1.88 yen per day (Shakai 1936: 53; Ohsato 1966: 68). To earn their income, the prostitutes in1924 served a mean 2.54 customers per night (Keishi 1933: 96; Kusama 1930: 220-21; Uemura
1929: 492-501). They worked about 28 nights per month (Keishi 1933: 96-98).
2. The contractual logic. -- This indenture contract in the licensed sector reflected astraightforward economic logic (Ramseyer 1991). Young women understood that prostitution was
dangerous, extraordinarily harsh, and imposed a massive upfront hit to their reputations. What ismore, they understood that they incurred that reputational hit even if they quit after a very shortperiod. Recruiters promised them very high wages, but they understood that recruiters had every
incentive to exaggerate.
As a result, before a young woman agreed to work at a brothel she needed credible
assurance that she would earn wages high enough to compensate her for the extremely negative
characteristics associated with the job. Were there no reputational hit to entering the industry, she
could try the job for a few months to see how much she could earn. Given that she incurred thereputational cost even from a short stint, however, she could not readily verify the recruiters' claims.
Recruiters overcame this contractual problem by paying the woman a large fraction of her
earnings upfront, and capping the number of years she would have to work. If the brothel paid her

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1000 yen in advance and set the maximum term to six years, she knew the minimum she would
earn. She also knew that if she repaid it earlier (as most prostitutes did), she would earn evenhigher effective monthly wages.
In turn, the brothel needed a way to create an incentive for its prostitutes to please theircustomers. The women performed wrenching work in impossible-to-monitor environments. If
brothels paid them a fixed wage (like an initial 1000 yen payment on a fixed six-year term), they
had little incentive to try to please their customers. If she were sufficiently unpleasant that guests
seldom requested her by name, so much the better.
By coupling a maximum six-year term with the ability to quit early, the brothel gave aprostitute an incentive to please her customers. The more customers requested her, the more
revenue she generated. The more she generated, the sooner she could quit.
3. Unlicensed prostitutes. -- Below the licensed prostitutes in this sexual services market
worked the independent, unlicensed prostitutes. Given the choice between the two sectors, most
prostitutes preferred the licensed. From 1920 to 1927, of all the women who applied for work aslicensed prostitutes in Tokyo, only 62 percent found jobs (Chuo 1926: 381-82; Kusama 1930: 2730, 36). Many of the unlicensed prostitutes were those women whom the licensed brothels had
refused to hire (Kusama 1930: 37). Historical records contain no reliable censuses of theunlicensed workers, but otherwise trustworthy observers put their number at about 50,000 in the
mid-1920s (Fukumi 1928: 26-28, 32, 50-56, 178).
Because the unlicensed prostitutes nominally violated the law, they lacked the option ofworking for an established brothel. Brothels developed reputations. Given that illegal unlicensed
prostitutes could not work for a brothel with a reputation for high quality service, the unlicensed
prostitutes earned less money. Among female workers from the northern Akita prefecture in 1934,
licensed prostitutes earned room & board plus 884 yen per year. Bar maids (shakufu; the generaleuphemism in this literature for unlicensed prostitutes) made 518 yen, waitresses made 210 yen,and other women workers made 130 yen (Shakai 1935: 160-61).
The unlicensed sector also presented clients with higher risks. By law, licensed prostitutes
underwent weekly medical examinations for venereal disease, and infected women could not
return to work until they recovered. In 1932, 3.2 percent of licensed prostitutes in Tokyo had
venereal or other infectious disease. The same study found a 9.7 percent rate among unlicensed
prostitutes. Other studies confirm a 1-3 percent infection rate among licensed prostitutes, but findrates much higher than 10 percent among the unlicensed (Keishi 1933: 143-44; Uemura 1918;
Kusama 1930: 288, 291; Fukumi 1928: 93, 168-69; Chuo 1926: 433-35).
4. Karayuki. -- As Japanese businessmen moved abroad for work, young women followed.
There in the foreign countries, the women worked as prostitutes for them. "Karayuki-san,"Japanese called them: "women heading abroad" (Nihon 1920). Given the usual preference among
expatriate Japanese men for Japanese women, they earned substantially higher wages than theirlocal competitors. Given the cost of relocating abroad, they earned generally higher wages thanthey could earn within Japan (Park 2014: 451).
These expatriate prostitutes tended to come from two discrete communities on or near thesouthern island of Kyushu: Shimabara and Amakusa. That most of them came from a few small
communities makes implausible any notion that they had been tricked by duplicitous recruiters.
Trickery works when the target audience does not know what is at stake. When young women (or8Comfort Women: Page

girls) from small, closed communities leave for several years and then return, they report what
happened. Word travels, and others in the community learn what the trip entails.
Author Tomoko Yamazaki (1972) traveled to Amakusa to explore this history. There, she
befriended an elderly emigrant prostitute named Osaki. Osaki had indeed worked many years
abroad, but hers was not a story either of paternal oppression or of sexual slavery. Osaki had beenborn in a small village to a family who already had a boy and a girl. A few years after her birth,her father had died. Her mother then found a new lover. As he had no interest in her very smallchildren, she abandoned them and married him anyway. The three children survived together in atiny shack, and scrapped together what they could to eat. Other women in the community had
worked as prostitutes abroad, and had returned with substantial sums of money. In time, her older
sister left to work abroad as a prostitute herself.
When Osaki turned ten, a recruiter stopped by and offered her 300 yen upfront if she would
agree to go abroad. She discussed it with her brother, and decided to take the work to help him
establish himself in farming. She travelled to Malaysia, and worked as a maid for three years. She
was happy. Her family fed her white rice and fish every day, which was more than the threechildren had been able to scavenge in Amakusa.
At age 13, she began working for the family as a prostitute. Because of the cost of passage
and three years of room and board, she now owed 2000 yen. Under the new terms, customers paid
2 yen for a short stay and 10 yen for an overnight visit. The brothel owner kept half the amount,and provided room and board. Out of the remaining half, she paid down her outstanding balanceand bought her own cosmetics and clothing. If she worked hard, she found that she could repay
about 100 yen a month.
Before Osaki had finished repaying her loan, her owner died and she found herself
transferred to a brothel in Singapore. She disliked her owner, so one day she and some of theothers went down to the harbor and bought a ticket back to Malaysia. She found a new brothel.
She liked the couple who owned it, and in time took to calling the wife "mother." There she stayed
until an expatriate Britisher made her his mistress. Later in life, she returned to her home town inJapan.
B. Prostitution in Korea
1. The phenomenon. -- As Japanese emigrants began to move to Korea, they establishedin their communities structures akin to the licensed prostitution system at home. Japan formallyannexed Korea in 1910, and the new government imposed uniform licensing rules across all Korea
in 1916. It set the minimum age for prostitution at 17 (not 18 as on the Japanese islands), andrequired regular medical examinations (Fujinaga 1998a; Fujinaga 2004; Kim & Kim 2018: 18, 21).
Although both Koreans and Japanese could use the new licensing system, the Japanese didso more readily. By 1929, for example, 1789 Japanese licensed prostitutes worked in Korea but
only 1262 Koreans. The Japanese prostitutes entertained 450,300 guests, where the Koreansentertained 110,700 (252 guests per year for the Japanese prostitute, 88 for the Korean). By 1935
the number of Japanese licensed prostitutes had fallen to 1778 but the number of Koreans still had
risen only to 1330 (Kim & Kim 2018: 18, 21; Fujinaga 2004).
Plenty of Korean women worked as prostitutes, but they simply did not work within thelicensing structure. In 1935 Korea, 414 Japanese women worked as bar maids and 4320 as cabaret
workers (both euphemisms for unlicensed prostitutes). Of Korean women, 1290 worked as
barmaids and 6553 as cabaret workers (Nihon 1994: 58, 65, 76; Chosen 1906-42; Nihongun xx:
779).

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To recruit their licensed prostitutes, Korean brothels used indenture contracts much like thosein Japan. Note, however, that Koreans (both potential prostitutes and potential customers) werepoorer than Japanese. Over the economy as a whole, from 1910 to 1940 the ratio of Japanese to
Korean wages varied from about 2.5 to 1.5. Korean men in the 1930s earned about 1 to 2 yen perday (Odaka 1975: 150, 153).
Prostitutes charged high prices, but Japanese women charged more than Korean. By one
account, in 1926 Korean prostitutes charged 3 yen for an assignation; Japanese prostitutes in Korea
charged 6 to 7 yen. Customers spent an average 3.9 yen on visit to a Korean licensed prostitute;
they spent an average of 8 yen on a visit to a Japanese licensed prostitute in Korea (Kim & Kim
2018: 26, 89, 96; Nihon yuran 1932: 461). In one (apparently poorer) Korean community in 1929,
Japanese licensed prostitutes generated annual revenues of 1,052 yen; Korean licensed prostitutes
generated 361 yen (Nihon 1994).
The lower Korean revenues resulted in higher upfront cash payments to the Japanese
prostitutes working in Korea than to the Korean prostitutes. One source (Okumura xx; Kim & Kim
2018: 96) described Korean licensed prostitutes receiving advances of 250-300 yen (andoccasionally 400-500 yen) on three year contracts; Japanese licensed prostitutes received 10003000 yen (note the higher amounts than in Japan). Another source calculated the average upfront
payment to Korean licensed prostitutes at 420 yen, while the Japanese licensed prostitute received
1730 yen (Nihon 1994: 63).
Consistent with the experience of prostitutes in Japan quitting within five years, Koreanlicensed prostitutes left the industry by their mid-20s. In one study, 61 percent of Korean licensed
prostitutes were 20-25 years old; only 16 percent were over 25 (Kim & Kim 2018: 97; see Ito
1931: 172-94). In another, 680 of the 1101 licensed prostitutes in the Seoul area were age 20-24,
but only 273 were 25-29. Of that group of 1101, 294 were in their fifth year of service; 65 werein their sixth, and 17 in their seventh. On the base population of 1101, 317 entered in 1924, and407 quit (Michiya 1928).
2. Korean prostitution abroad. -- Like the Japanese karayuki, young Korean women too
travelled abroad. Crucially, Korean women went abroad to work as prostitutes long before several
Shanghai brothels became the first "comfort stations" in 1932. Already by the 1920s, Korean
women were travelling to Manchuria to work as prostitutes (Fujinaga 1998a). In 1929, 196 Korean
women worked in Taiwan as licensed or unlicensed prostitutes (Fujinaga 2001; Taiwan 1932), andin 1924 67 Korean women worked in Dailin (Fujinaga 2000: 219). Presumably, some served aJapanese clientelle, some served a Korean clientelle, and some served a Chinese clientelle.
And long after those first comfort stations, Korean women continued to travel abroad towork as unlicensed prostitutes as well -- again, for a wide variety of customers. In 1937, forexample, the Tianjin immigrants association reported 81 unlicensed prostitutes from Korea.
During one month in 1938, 90 Korean women petitioned the (Japanese-controlled) Korean
government for permission to travel to the Chinese city of Jinan to work as unlicensed prostitutes(Kitashina 1938). And while 12 Korean women worked in comfort stations in Shanghai in 1940,
527 worked as unlicensed prostitutes (Takei 2012: tab. 6; Zai Jokai 1938; Zai Jokai 1937).
C. Recruitment in Japan and Korea
1. Japan. -- Many reformers sought to ban prostitution in prewar Japan, but virtually none
complained about recruiters abducting young women into brothels. Young women from poor
communities routinely left town to work as prostitutes, but they rarely claimed that anyone forcedComfort Women: Page 11

them to take the job. Neither did many reformers complain that recruiters tricked young women
into working for brothels (Senda 1973: 89). Instead, when Japanese reformers complained about
how women had become prostitutes, they complained about the parents: that parents had
effectively "sold" their daughters into prostitution. They had not wanted to go, some womenreported. But their parents had induced them to agree in order to collect the indenture advance.
For the network of overseas comfort stations, the Japanese government drafted recruiting
regulations designed to limit potential fraud. The resulting government regulations suggest thatthe government realized the political risks it was running. Reformers within Japan had beenfighting for decades to ban prostitution. The last thing the government needed -- the regulations
imply -- were accounts of naive young girls duped by mercenary and dishonest recruiters into a
multi-year stint in a Shanghai brothel.
To avoid this morass, the Home Ministry issued the memorandum quoted earlier (Sec. I.C.).
It told comfort station recruiters to hire only women who already worked as prostitutes. To insurethat the women knew what they they agreeing to do, it told police not to issue travel documents
unless each woman applied in person with her contract. And at the time of the interview, it
demanded that the police tell each applicant to return immediately when her contract expired.
2. Korea. -- Korea had a problem distinct from any in Japan. It had a large corps ofprofessional labor recruiters, and those recruiters had a history of deceptive tactics. In 1935,
Korean police records counted 247 Japanese and 2,720 Korean recruiters. To be sure, these men
and women (and they included both men and women) recruited workers for factories as well as
brothels (Nihon 1994: 51; Yamashita 2006: 675). But throughout the prewar decades, newspapers
reported recruiter fraud related to the sex industry. Back in 1918, the Japanese language daily inSeoul (Keijo nippo 1918; Senda 1973: 89) complained of "a massive increase in the number ofcases where a delinquent entices a woman to Seoul and, after playing all sorts of tricks on her,sells her off to one of the 'dubious restaurants.'" In the late 1930s, Korean newspapers reported aring of 11 recruiters who attracted over 50 young women into prostitution (Toa 1937). They
reported one astonishingly skillful couple who had deceived over 100. Apparently, the couple
promised parents that they would find a job for their daughters in Seoul factories, paid the parents
10 or 20 yen, and then forwarded the daughters to overseas brothels for 100 to 1300 yen each (Toa
1939; Yamashita 2006: 675).
D. Comfort Stations
1. Venereal disease. -- The reams of government documents about the comfort stations
from the 1930s and early 1940s make clear that the government established the institution to fightvenereal disease. To be sure, it had other reasons too. It wanted to reduce rapes. And one strange
1939 army document from North China suggested that comfort stations helped fight communism
within its ranks (Kitashina 1939). Primarily, however, the military set up the stations to fightvenereal disease: by definition, a "comfort station" was a brothel that had agreed to follow themilitary's stringent sanitation and contraceptive procedures.
The Japanese military did not need additional prostitutes; it had plenty. Prostitutes havefollowed armies everywhere, and they followed the Japanese army in Asia. Instead, the Japanesemilitary needed healthy prostitutes. During the army's Siberian expedition in 1918, thecommanders had found large portions of their command disabled by venereal disease (Senda 1973:
14; see estimates of days lost, Yamada & Hirama 1923: 269). As the army expanded across China

Comfort Women: Page 12

in the 1930s, it found that there too the local prostitutes were heavily infected. If its soldiers weregoing to patronize brothels, it wanted them patronizing brothels that kept the disease risk in check.
To minimize that risk of disease, the army took several steps. First, it licensed thosebrothels that agreed to meet its standards -- and named them "comfort stations." It required
prostitutes at the licensed brothels to undergo weekly medical examinations. If they became
infected, it banned them from serving customers until fully recovered. It ordered all customers touse condoms (provided free either by the Army or by the brothel), and forbad prostitutes fromserving anyone who refused to do so. It required all prostitutes and customers to wash withdisinfectants immediately after sex. And it banned its soldiers from patronizing any brothels otherthan the licensed institutions.2
2. Contract terms. -- The comfort stations hired their prostitutes on contracts that
resembled those used by the licensed brothels in Japan and Korea. First, the contracts covered amulti-year term. Reflecting the natural hesitation anyone would have about working near thefrontlines, the contracts usually specified only two-year terms. Recall that the Japanese contracts
typically provided six-year terms, and the Korean contracts three-year terms. Some Korean
comfort women in Burma even worked on contracts as short as six months to a year (e.g., Josei
1997: 1-19).
For these relatively short-term assignments, the brothels typically paid several hundred yen
up-front. Sample contracts for Japanese women recruited to Shanghai comfort stations in 1937
provided advances of 500 to 1000 yen (Naimusho 1938). Similarly, Home Ministry documentsfrom 1938 report Japanese women travelling to the Shanghai comfort stations on 600-700 yen
advances, with one woman receiving an advance in the 700-800 yen range, and two in the 300500 yen range (Naimusho 1938).
The comfort stations typically copied their other contractual terms from the standard
Japanese and Korean brothel contracts. Take the 1943 military regulations regarding the stationsin Malaya. Of the gross revenue a prostitute generated, the brothel was to pay the woman a fractionthat turned on the amount of her outstanding debt. With 1500 yen or more outstanding, she wasto receive 40 percent of the revenue; if she had less than 1500 yen, she was to receive 50 percent;and if she had no outstanding debt she was to take 60 percent. Of this share, the brothel was toapply 2/3 toward the remaining debt, and directly pay the prostitute the rest. In addition, the brothel
was to open a postal savings account in her name, and to deposit each month 3 percent of grossrevenue she generated (Maree 1943; see also U.S. Office 1944).
Upon completing the contractual term or (if earlier) repaying the loan, the women could
go home. In the course of his research on comfort women, Kako Senda met a veteran who had
helped to recruit women from Japan. Obviously, he had self-interested reasons to say what he said.
But when Senda (1973: 26-27) asked him, "were there any women who actually paid back the1000 yen [advance] and went free?," "oh, there were," he replied. "There were lots. Among theones who went with the first regiment, even those who were slowest paid it off in a few months
and went free."
3. Prostitute income. -- The amount that a prostitute earned beyond her up-front advancevaried. Obviously, by the contractual terms themselves, that amount depended on the revenue a2

Gunsei (1942); Shina (1942); SCAP (1945); Minami Shina (1939); Morikawa (1939); Mandalay (1943);
U.S. Interrogation (n.d.); Hito gun (1942).

Comfort Women: Page 13

prostitute generated. Scholars routinely suggest that that brothel owners must have cheated theirprostitutes. And no doubt some did. Some people break contracts in any industry. But otherbrothel owners did pay their prostitutes. One Korean publisher recently reprinted a diary kept by
a receptionist for comfort stations in Burma and Singapore. Several times, the receptionist notedthat the comfort women kept postal savings accounts, and that he deposited money on their behalf
in them (KIH 2016b). Indeed, some comfort women earned and saved enough to establish comfort
stations of their own (Park 2014: 111).
Of all the Korean comfort women who left accounts, Mun Ok-ju seems to have done wellmost flamboyantly. She writes in her memoir (KIH 2016c):
I saved a considerable amount of money from tips. ... I knew that all the soldiers
put their earnings in the saving accounts in the field post office, so I decided to put mymoney in the saving account. I asked a soldier to make a personal seal and put 500 yen in
the account. ... I became the owner of the savings passbook for the first time in my life. I
worked in Daegu as a nanny and a street seller from the childhood but I remained poor no
matter how hard I worked. I could not believe that I could have so much money in mysaving account. A house in Daegu cost 1,000 yen at the time. I could let my mother havean easy life. I felt very happy and proud. The savings passbook became my treasure. ...
It was fun to go shopping by rickshaw. I can't forget the experience of shopping ina market in Rangoon. There were lots of jewelry shops because many jewels were
produced in Burma, and ruby and jade were not expensive. One of my friends collectedmany jewels. I thought I should have a jewel myself, so I went and bought a diamond.
I became a popular woman in Rangoon. There were a lot more officers in Rangoon
than near the frontlines, so I was invited to many parties. I sang songs at parties andreceived lots of tips.
E. The Closing Years of the War:The Japanese government mobilized Korean workers most aggressively during the last two
years of the war, and scholars have sometimes suggested that those were the years it mostaggressively recruited comfort women. Yet those were not years it was trying to staff brothels.
Those were years it was moving prostitutes out of brothels and into munitions factories.
As the war turned bad for Japan, the military began running out of men. In 1936, 240,000
men served in the army. Once the army invaded China, that number climbed to 950,000 (1937).
It hit 3.58 million in 1943, 5.4 million in 1944, and 7.34 million in 1945. Increasingly, the army
called up reservists approaching age 40. By the end of the war, 60.9 percent of the men aged 2040 had served in the military, and 2 million had been killed (Watanabe 2014: 1, 8).
The military was also running out of supplies (see generally Miwa 2014). As the army
called up its 30-something reservists and sent them to the front, it needed others to take their placein the mines and factories. It had not drafted its young Koreans (despite their being Japanesecitizens) into the army. By 1943, however, it did begin sending large numbers of Korean men to
those mines and factories (Hatarakeru 1943; Romu 1943; Chosen 1944). Simultaneously, it begansending young unmarried Japanese and Korean women into the factories as well (Chosen 1944;
Chosen 1945; Hatarakeru 1943; Higuchi 2005: 53).
Brothels were the least of the government's worries. Steadily, brothels and high-end
restaurants began to close. The army was shifting all plausible Japanese men from civilian
production to the front. To replace them it was moving Korean men to Japan. It was moving both
Japanese and Korean women out of homes and inessential jobs to munitions production (Senso

Comfort Women: Page 14

1943; Hanto 1944; Chosen 1944). Think Rosy the Riveter in Korea: the Mainichi shimbun
newspaper (1944) published a letter from a woman hauling freight in Pusan harbor. Our country
needs us. "Just because we're women doesn't mean that we can closet ourselves in our homes,"
she exclaimed. Between the general austerity in the air and the loss of prostitutes to the factories,
brothels steadily went out of business (Senso 1943; Hata 1992: 330, 333; Hakken 1943).
III. The Genesis and Politics of the AccountA. Yoshida:
The notion that the Japanese army coerced Korean women to work in comfort stations
dates from the 1980s. In 1982, a writer named Seiji Yoshida began talking about "comfort womenhunts" he had led. He gave lectures, and soon incorporated the stories into what he styled a memoir.
"My War Crimes," he (1983) called it. He had worked from 1942 in a labor office in Yamaguchi.
There, he had supervised the work of mobilizing Korean workers. In May of 1943, he wrote, his
office received an order to recruit 2000 Korean workers. More pointedly, it received an order toacquire 200 Koreans to work as "comfort women."With nine soldiers, Yoshida continued, he went to the island of Jeju. There, he led "comfort
women hunts." In a typical account, he (1983: 108) recalled finding a compound where 20-30
women worked. He and his team went in with guns. When the women started screaming, nearby
Korean men came running. He and his team grabbed the women by their arms, however, anddragged them off. The mob soon grew to over 100, but Yoshida's soldiers drew their bayonets andheld them at bay. They loaded the women into the truck, drove 5 or 6 km, and then stopped for ahalf hour to rape them. The military transported the women to the harbor and loaded them onto
its ships -- hands tied, and each woman bound to the next.
The Asahi Shimbun newspaper gave Yoshida's story flamboyant coverage ("Yoshida
shogen" 2014; Hata 2018). With that coverage, the paper catapulted Yoshida's story to the heartof the modern comfort women "narrative." Yoshida is the man who started the story that the
Wisconsin high school textbook repeated -- that Japanese soldiers "dragooned" teenage Koran girls
into working as "sex slaves." And Yoshida is the man on whom the U.N. Human Rights
Commission based its savage 1995 attack on the Japanese government (U.N. 1996).
In fact, Yoshida had invented the story. He had written an immensely readable memoir,complete with long dialogues. Prominent historians questioned it from the start. Ikuhito Hata
(1999, 2018) was among the first to doubt the account, and travelled to Jeju to investigate. He
found the village where Yoshida claimed to have conducted one of the larger hunts, but no one
remembered anything about a raid. This is a small place, one elderly man told him. If the Japanesemilitary had abducted women to serve as prostitutes, no one would forget it.
Other historians and reporters -- both Japanese and Korean -- followed. Yoshida initiallyinsisted that the events had occurred. He started avoiding reporters and scholars, and eventuallyadmitted to having fabricated the book. By the mid-1990s, Japanese scholars had dismissed
Yoshida's account as fiction. Even Yoshiaki Yoshimi -- so celebrated by the 20 U.S. historians -decided in 1993: "I had no choice but to conclude that I could not use [Yoshida's] statements as
testimony" (Zaishuto 2014).
In the years since 1982, the Asahi newspaper had covered Yoshida's sensational accountin over a dozen articles. In 2014, it finally pronounced them "false" and retracted the entire
portfolio ("Yoshida shogen" 2014; Jiyu (2014); Zaishuto 2014; Asahi shimbun moto 2014). "FromApril to May of this year," explained the Asahi, "we interviewed approximately 40 residents ofJeju Island in their mid-70s to 90's. We were not able to obtain any testimony corroborating theComfort Women: Page 15

forced recruitment claims of Mr. Yoshida." Accordingly, it continued, "we have concluded that
Mr Yoshida's cliams that he forcibly recruited comfort women from Jeju Island are fraudulent.
We retract the articles" (Zaishuto 2014). Other than the testimony of a very few comfort women(perhaps most prominently, the four quoted earlier), no one has offered any evidence of anything
like Yoshida's "hunt."
B. The Non-diplomacy:
In 1991, Kim Hak-sun identified herself publicly as a comfort woman. She was the first,
and the next year she and several other comfort women (along with several men who claimed tohave been forced into other jobs) sued the Japanese government for compensation. The casereached the Supreme Court in 2004, but the court dismissed the claims on the straightforward (andobviously correct) ground that the Korean government had waived all claims by its citizens against
Japan in 1965.3 As one source summarized the deal (S. Korea 2005):
South Korea agreed never to make further compensation demands, either at the government
or individual level, after receiving $800 million in grants and soft loans from Japan ascompensation for its 1910-45 colonial rule.
Meanwhile, the Japanese government formally apologized to the comfort women in 1992.
The Diet passed a resolution ordering the government to make things right, and the government
solicited private donations on top of its own budgeted amount for a compensation fund that would
eventually top 5 billion yen. To each comfort women, it proposed to pay a flat 2 million yen, andup to another 3 million yen toward medical care (Digital n.d.).
But the dispute did not end. In 1996, the U.N. Human Rights Commission (2016)
published a scathing report on the comfort stations. Starting in 2000, comfort women filed several
suits (all unsuccessful) against the Japanese government in courts in the U.S. (Columbia n.d.). And
in 2007, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives issued its own
blistering report (Protecting 2007).
In 2007 the Japanese Diet passed another apology, and in December 2015 Prime Minister
Abe issued yet another (though with accusations that he walked back earlier apologies). As theForeign Minister put it, he "expresses anew sincere apologies and remorse from the bottom of hisheart to all those who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable physical and psychologicalwounds as ‘comfort women.’" The government added another $8 million in compensation, andthe South Korean government agreed not to make further demands. The deal, they promised eachother, was "final and irreversible" (Choe 2015).
It was not to be. Agreement or no agreement, a South-Korean government-appointed panel
declared the 2015 agreement unsatisfactor (Choe 2017). In early 2018, the newly elected Korean
President Moon Jae-in announced the 2015 agreement "defective as it not only goes against the
principle of truth and justice, but did not reflect the view of the victims" and in any case wasinsufficiently "sincere" (Choe 2017, 2018; Choe & Gladstone 2018). Treaty or no 1965 treaty, theSouth Korean Supreme Court held that Koreans who claim to have been drafted to work at
Japanese factories in the 1940s could sue the companies (Choe 2018; Choe & Glastone 2018). The
Moon government effectively voided the 2015 agreement by liquidating the Japanese foundation3[No names given] v. Koku, 1879 Hanrei jiho 58 (Sup. Ct. Nov. 29, 2004). At least two other cases werealso filed, but these were dismissed by the Supreme Court as well. See Zaisan oyobi seikyu ken ni kansuru mondai
no kaiketsu narabi ni keizai kyoryoku ni kansuru Nihon koku to Dai kan minkoku to no aida no kyotei [Agreement
between Japan and the Republic of Korea Concerning the Economic Cooperation and the Resolution of Problems
Involving Property and Claims, Treaty No. 27, 1965.

Comfort Women: Page 16

set up to implement it (South 2018). And as if any of this were not confusing enough, in January
2019 South Korean police arrested the former Supreme Court Chief Justice on charges that he hadstalled the labor cases against the Japanese firms for political reasons (Choe 2019).
IV. The CDH Problem:
A. The "Counter-Narratives":
Although those comfort women who took the limelight recounted the "sex slave narrative"
so often repeated, others gave different accounts. Could these others have been lying? They could,of course, though it is hard to see what benefit they would earn by telling these stories. The
scholars to whom they told them -- Park Yu-Ha, Sara Soh, Kako Senda -- are not partisans in thisdebate.
By the words of these other comfort women, some of the women and soldiers foundsympathy and compassion in each other. The prostitutes worked a degrading and dangerous job,
but so did privates second class. Many of the prostitutes may have been sold by abusive parents,
but most of the privates had been equally unwillingly drafted. They were roughly of the same age.
Call it false consciousness if you will, but some of the comfort women and soldiers sometimes
found love.
Korean comfort woman Mun Oku-chu reminisced about her love for Japanese soldier
Ichiro Yamada (KIH 2016c).
[I]f he did not show up on his once a week holiday, I became so worried wondering
if he was killed by the enemy that I could not work properly. He made me worry so much. ...
I prayed for safety of Ichiro Yamada. After two or three of months, the troop unit to which
Yamada belonged returned from the front. Yamada returned in good health. He
immediately came to the comfort station. He said "I, private first class soldier Yamada,
have just come back from the front." Yamada gave a salute to me. We hugged in full ofjoy. Such a day was so special that the comfort station owner Matsumoto (a Korean from
Daegu) closed business for the day. The comfort station was full of excitement, and we,
comfort women, contributed 1 yen per woman to hold a big party for them."
They -- comfort women and soldiers -- were in it for the same reason, recalled Mun. "The soldiers
and we had the same thoughts, that is, we must work hard for our emperor. The soldiers gave up
their wives, children and their own lives. Knowing how they felt, I did my best to solace them byhaving conversation with them." As another comfort woman put it (Park 2014: 80):
Some of the men were scared, and would cry before going into battle. Those times,
I always tried to comfort them, and to tell them to "be sure to come home alive." And when
they really did come home alive, I was happy.
For the soldiers, their time with the "comfort women" provided what scholar Park Yu-Ha(2014: 86) called "private space." It was a place where they could express emotions and say things
not allowed in the military environment. One comfort woman recalled (Park 2014: 85-86):
Some men came because they wanted to talk together .... They wanted to tell me theirhearts. ... They'd remember their wives back home, and then sit there and cry. ... They'dthink about their wives, and wouldn't want to have a relationship with other women like us.
They would leave without doing anything, but they'd still come. ... They wanted to talkwhile they had a drink. Lots of men came without having sex."
A Japanese comfort woman talked fondly of meeting men from her home island (Senda 1973: 81):
What were the happy times? Well, for me it was probably when I met soldiers from
Shikoku. The closer they had been to my home (like Ehime or Matsuyama), the happier I

Comfort Women: Page 17

was. The soldiers, too, felt like they had met a relative. Some didn't even have sex. They
just chatted with me about the festivals at home, or the mountains and the rivers. The
soldiers seemed satisfied with that.
Sometimes the soldiers proposed marriage. Sometimes the soldiers and comfort womenactually married (Park 2014: 86). Koreans were Japanese citizens, however second-class. To someof the comfort women as to many of the soldiers, they were there to serve the country. They each
had a hard job, but -- as one comfort woman put it -- "we were both doing this under the emperor'scommand, so it couldn't be helped" (Park 2014: 84).
In some posts -- perhaps in many posts -- the result was less aggression (much less rape)
than a curious domesticity. Life in the army was not relentless battle. It could include weeks of
waiting. During those long periods of calm, notes Park (2014: 70-71), the men and women foundsolace in each other. Like all the accounts quoted in this dispute, take the comments withskepticism -- but Park quotes one lieutenant:If you're stationed at a post for a long time with the same comfort women, they start
to feel like wives. ... The soldiers took good care of them, and the comfort women
responded in kind. On their days off, sometimes they'd bring over some local produce, or
do the laundry for the soldiers. Sometimes the comfort women would sit and watch thesoldiers fix their machine guns. ... It was a relaxed time, and the soldiers would share theirlunch with them. The relationship between soldiers and comfort women in these posts waslike this everywhere."
B. Silenced Comfort Women:
By insisting instead on universal victimization and rape, writes Park, modern hypernationalists in Korea have robbed many comfort women of their past. Quite self-consciously, thenationalists set out to construct an edifying national history. Toward that end, they imposed onto
the past a patriotism born of zealous opposition to the the occupying Japanese. But in doing so,
explains Park, they denied many of the comfort women the chance to relive their memories inpeace.
Koreans had been Japanese citizens. To be sure, the Japanese government treated them inmany ways as second-class citizens. It had conquered the peninsula and annexed it in 1910, anddid not conquer it out of kindness. By 1919, some Koreans had launched a violent independence
campaign.
Not all Koreans shared the virulent anti-Japanese sentiment of the independence movement.
Where the indigenous dynasty had been both corrupt and ineffective, the Japanese government
had imposed a stable order. Many Koreans responded by embracing this new regime. From 1938
to 1943, over a million Koreans volunteered for the Japanese army. Among those who joined,some would serve in the officer corps, and some would climb to the rank of general (Miyamoto
2017: 8).
Within this world of conflicting allegiances, many of the comfort women seem to have felt
a common national identity with the soldiers. The love and compassion between them flowedfrom that identity. Yet these memories, writes Park (2014: 83), the nationalists have forced thewomen to "discard." In the decades since the war, "Korea itself has lived by erasing -- in the same
way as these women -- these memories." Within the newly invented collective history, the only
"identity" allowed the comfort women is that of "victims abused by Japan" (Park 2014: 152). A
history in which comfort women "loved Japanese soldiers" and in which they accepted "theapology of Japan" is a history for which there is no place. A history in which a destitute youngComfort Women: Page 18

woman "sacrificed herself for the good of the family" is similarly one for which there is no place(Park 2014: 15).
C. The CDH:
One organization lies at the heart of much of the current dispute with Japan, andmanipulates this fictive nationalist history to help drive the relentless opposition to reconciliation
with Japan: Chong Dae Hyup (CDH), the "Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual
Slavery" (KIH 2016d). The CDH organizes the weekly protests in front of the Japanese embassyin Seoul. It began the installation of the comfort women statutes around the world -- tellingly,
statues not of the 20-year-old women who became the comfort women but of 15 year-old girls
who did not. It pressured the former comfort women to reject the compensation offered by Japan(KIH 2016d). And it militantly polices scholars who would question the "sex-slave narrative" (Chi2005; Gunji 2013).
CDH largely controls the public testimony by the comfort women. It chooses those willingto back their sex-slave narrative, and intimidates the rest into silence. It maintains its ability to do
this by collaborating in the operation of a nursing home for the most visible comfort women, theHouse of Nanumu (Soh 2008: 96). The women at Nanumu are the women most willing to testify.
By helping to control Nanumu, the CDH controls who scholars and reporters will see and what the
women will say. As political scientist Yi (2018) put it, the "prevailing narrative of abductions isbased on the oral testimonies of a small number of women (16 of 238 registered survivors in 1990s),
associated with activist organizations (e.g., House of Sharing [i.e., the nursing home]; Korean
Council [i.e., CDH])" (Yi 2018).
By sabotaging any reconciliation between South Korea and Japan, the CDH directly
promotes a key North Korean political goal -- and that seems to be the point. As Park (KIH 2016d)
explains it, CDH "has used the comfort women issue for its political purpose, which is to drive awedge into U.S.-Japan-South Korea security partnership.” Initially organized by Korean
communists, the group was at one time designated by the South Korean government as a North
Korean affiliate (KIH 2016d). Its long-time senior representative -- Yun Mee-Hyang -- was herself
investigated for North Korean ties in 2013. Other members of her family have for years been
embroiled in controversy and litigation over whether they did or did not maintain ties to the north(with the courts concluding in 2018 that they did not).
As its possible North-Korean affiliation might suggest, many comfort women deeply resent
the CDH. Back in 2004, several comfort women sued it to try to retake control over their
movement (Moto 2018). The group remains in control, however, and has successfully intimidated
most of the remaining women. Park Yu-Ha confesses herself puzzled that the group ever allowed
her to interview the women (KIH 2016d):
I regained my interest in [the comfort women] issue in the early 2000s when I heardthat Chong Dae Hyup was confining surviving women in a nursing home called House of
Nanumu. The only time these women were allowed to talk to outsiders was when Chong
Dae Hyup needed them to testify for the UN Special Rapporteur or the U.S. politicians.
But for some reason I was allowed to talk to them one day in 2003.
Even these Nanumu women were unhappy with the CDH. Park continues (KIH 2016d):
I could sense that women were not happy being confined in this place. One of the women(Bae Chun-hee) told me she reminisced the romance she had with a Japanese soldier. She
said she hated her father who sold her. She also told me that women there didn't appreciateComfort Women: Page 19

being coached by Chong Dae Hyup to give false testimonies but had to obey Chong Dae
Hyup's order.
CDH made its threats credible when Japan first offered the women compensation in 1995.
Determined to sabotage the coming rapprochement, it ordered the women to refuse the payments.
Some took the money anyway. According to Park (KIH 2016d):
When Japan offered compensation through Asian Women's Fund in 1995, 61
former Korean comfort women defied Chong Dae Hyup's order and acceptedcompensation. Those 61 women were vilified as traitors. Their names and addresses were
published in newspapers as prostitutes, and they had to live the rest of their lives in disgrace.
Korean-American anthropologist Sarah Soh (2008: 101) confirms their fears. Although some
comfort women invented dramatic new stories to keep themselves in the news, "other South
Korean survivors have firmly refused to be further interviewed after the initial investigation for
the government certification process." They have, Soh explains, "kept their silence out of fear of
making 'speech errors' that might lead to the cancellation of their registration and hence thecessation of their welfare support money."
D. Academic Dissent:
Together with its allies within South Korea, the CDH has maintained harsh pressure on any
who would dissent. Park Yu-Ha (2014: 28) stresses that private recruiters hired the women for
privately owned comfort stations, not the Japanese military. Albeit less directly, Sarah Soh (2008:240) suggests much the same. Yet the two women are hardly the only Korean scholars to writethat the Japanese military did not forcibly draft Korean women to its comfort stations.
Professor Jun Bong-Gwan of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
reviewed Park's monograph (KIH 2016e):
After reading the book, I was a little bit disappointed because there was nothing in the bookthat I didn't know. We all knew that Korean comfort women were not coercively taken
away by the Japanese military. Korean comfort station owners recruited women in the
Korean Peninsula and operated comfort stations in the battlefields.
The point seemed common sense: "The Japanese military was busy fighting all over Asia, and it
certainly didn't have time to be in Korea recruiting women."Seoul National University emeritus historian Ahn Byung-jik thought it common sense too.
He estimates, notes Soh (2008: 193), that "Koreans made up more than half the people who
recruited comfort women and ran the brothel business." Echoing Jun, Ahn explained, "Korean
people in the industry did the recruitment. Fundamentally, there was no need for the military todraft women forcibly" (Ianfu 2013).
But common sense is not at stake. Sarah Soh (2008: 102) observes that within Korea "few
reputable historians or nationally known scholars in the field of social science have involved
themselves in the task of sorting out the truth in the comfort women controversy." She attributes
their absence to "politics," and so it is. But it is politics as blood sport.
Seoul National University emeritus economist Lee Young-hoon described the comfort
stations as "regulated houses of prostitution for the army." More specifically (Nishioka 2017;
Seoul 2016):
The comfort woman system was a licensed prostitution system under the control of themilitary…. The comfort women were not sex slaves…. Korean comfort women wererecruited by pimps by means of advance payments and outright fraud…. There is noComfort Women: Page 20

evidence that there were 200,000 Korean comfort women. The number is somewherearound 5,000.
In 2004, Lee explained the history on television. No scholar -- not one -- thinks the Japanese
government "forcibly mobilized comfort women," implied Lee.
Almost immediately, the CDH launched a brutal campaign. He should resign, it announced.
If he refused, the SNU should fire him. In time, Lee relented, and visited the women in Nanumu
House. When he briefly tried to explain himself, the women went livid. For forty minutes,
according to reporters, they berated him. "It's inconceivable that he would compare us to thewomen who are selling their bodies at Tondochon," one declared. "I'd like to slug him if I could,"
said Kim Kun-Ja. "We were forcibly taken away." Lee went down on his hands and knees(literally) and apologized (Lee 2004; Ianfu 2004).
One Korean political scientist discussed Sarah Soh's book in class. His university
suspended him and investigated him on charges that he "supported Japanese war crimes." To
reclaim his job, "he wrote a letter of apology" (Yi 2018).
Management professor Chi Man-won suggested that many of the self-identified former
comfort women had not in fact worked as comfort women at all. Of those who had indeed been
comfort women, he said, most "were people [who] wanted to enter the sex trade because of theterrible economic situation." CDH declared this to be criminal defamation, and petitioned the local
prosecutors' office to initiate criminal prosecution (Chi 2005; Gunji (2013).
What happened to Chi is not clear, but what happened to Park Yu-ha herself is. For writing
the book that she did, Seoul prosecutors filed criminal defamation charges against her, and asked
for a three-year prison sentence. The district court acquitted her, but the high court reversed andfined her $8,848. The case now stands on appeal to the Supreme Court (Togo 2017; South 2017).
Economics professor Yon So-yon remarked in class that the comfort women had been
"voluntary prostitutes. The notion that they were forced into the position is manufactured history
without any basis in fact." The university promptly fired him, prosecutors filed charges forcriminal defamation, and in 2018 the district court sentenced him to six months in prison (Hannichi
2014; Ianfu 2018; Jitsuwa 2018; Kankoku 2018).
V. Conclusion
It is hard not to wonder whether our obsession in the West with the "sex slave narrative"
might have more to do with our own academic agenda than with anything in either Korea or Japan.
That narrative promised us a trifecta: it offered, as one scholar put it, "sexism, racism, andimperialism" combined (O'Brien 2000: 5). It presented, as another wrote, a single set of events thatcombined "masculinity, racism, and nationalism at their worst" (Low 2003).4 Faced with a story
so rich in the triggers by which we order our intellectual world, maybe we did not look very hardat the facts. We consigned doubters to the pariah status of "denier," and fell into line behind the
CDH.
"[S]tate-sponsored sexual slavery," the 20 historians called it. Call it what you will, but
the "narrative" of forcible military recruitment is simply untrue. It is an account that issimultaneously (i) implausible, (ii) for which there is no documentary evidence, (iii) based on
several entirely uncorroborated oral accounts, (iv) some of which were told by people who changed
their story after the financial and political stakes rose, (v) pushed aggressively by a fringe-left

4Comfort Women: Page 21

organization, (vi) in an environment where prosecutors file criminal charges against professors
who contest the account.

Comfort Women: Page 22

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