THE RECEPTION OF THE RAMSEYER ‘COMFORT WOMEN’ ARTICLE IN JAPAN:
HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL BACKGROUNDTESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI
KEY POINTS
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In this discussion paper, I argue that disturbing new developments in the Japanese
government’s response to the ‘comfort women’ problem and other important
historical issues are currently playing out within Japan and internationally.
Since 2006 and particularly since 2012, the Japanese government, while nominallystating for diplomatic purposes that it has ‘inherited’ the August 1993 Kōno
Statement on the ‘comfort women’ issue, has been seeking to erode the credibilityof the content of the statement, in the eyes both of domestic and international
opinion, by obscuring the role of the state and the military in the supervision andoperation of ‘comfort stations’ and denying the forcible or coercive recruitment of
women by the military.
In the international context, at least since 2015, the government has used an
expanded ‘strategic overseas dissemination’ budget to propagate these views in the
US and elsewhere.
In February 2021, the government took a further step in this process by stating thatthe term ‘military comfort women’ or ‘so-called “military comfort women”’ was nolonger to be used in an official context in Japan. Then in March 2021, the ruling
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) announced that a further strengthening of ‘strategic
overseas dissemination’ is one of its main objectives for the coming year.
In this context, Professor J. Mark Ramseyer’s recent article on the ‘comfort women’issue, ‘Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War’, issued online by the peer-reviewed
International Journal of Law and Economics (IRLE) in December 20201, hasparticularly important political resonance in Japan. Ramseyer’s paper claims that: (i)Japan’s wartime ‘comfort stations’ were run by private entrepreneurs, the Japanesemilitary’s only direct role being the maintenance of hygiene in the establishments;(ii) that ‘comfort women’ freely negotiated contracts with the ‘comfort station’owners, reflecting their personal interests and following the ‘basic game theoretic
principles of credible commitments’.
This article evoked a wave of objections from Japan scholars, legal scholars,
economists and others who pointed out that Ramseyer had entirely ignored therecruitment of ‘comfort women’ in places other than Japan and Korea and had failed
to produce any evidence of the existence of the contracts which he claimed toanalyse, and that his article contained multiple examples of mis-citation, cherry-

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picking of facts, misinterpretation of the content of sources and other flaws of
research quality and integrity.2 The IRLE article appeared almost simultaneously witha series of equally contentious articles (two of them published in peer-reviewed
journals) in which Professor Ramseyer makes what many critics see as misleading
and demeaning comments about the Hisabetsu Buraku, Korean and Okinawanminorities in Japan.3
Please note that I am not arguing that Prof. Ramseyer wrote any of his articles
because he was influenced by any of the trends or groups discussed below. His
motivation for writing his recent articles seems clearly set out in a 2020 essay inJapan Forward, where he expresses frustration that US Japanese Studies isdominated by ‘left-leaning’ scholars. His articles appear to express his determination
to present a different view of Japan.4
However, the historical and political trends discussed below are essential context forunderstanding the way in which his articles (particularly his article in IRLE) are being
received and weaponised in Japan.

BACKGROUND: THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT’S CHANGING POSITION ON THE ‘COMFORTWOMEN’ ISSUE
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In December 2015, Japan and South Korea issued a joint statement which wasintended to resolve the ‘comfort women’ issue ‘finally and irreversibly’, but thisfailed to have the desired effect.
One reason for this was that, at the time the statement was issued, the Japaneseand South Korean official positions on the issue were not converging but growing
further apart.
Following public testimony by survivors of the ‘comfort women’ system andinvestigations by Japan and Korea, in August 1993 Japan had issued the Kōno
Statement. This stated that, although many comfort stations were run by private
operators, the military were ‘involved directly in the establishment and managementof the comfort stations by such means as granting permissions to open the facilities,
equipping the facilities [and] drawing up the regulations for the comfort stations’and that ‘in some areas there were cases in which the then Japanese military directly
operated comfort stations’ 5. The statement also acknowledged that some ‘comfort
women’ had been ‘recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc.,
and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part in the
recruitments’. In his statement, Kōno went on to promise that ‘we hereby reiterate
our firm determination never to repeat the same mistake by forever engraving such
issues in our memories through the study and teaching of history’.6
In response to the Kōno Statement, a number of school history textbooks in Japanbegan to include brief mentions of the ‘comfort women’ issue, but a fierce backlashfrom neo-nationalist groups such as the Japan Society for History Textbook Reform

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(Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho o Tsukuru Kai), founded in 1996, reversed the trend. A
key part in this backlash was played by a group of right-wing politicians known as the‘Association of Young Parliamentarians for Considering History Textbooks’. The
Executive Secretary of this group was future Prime Minister Abe Shinzō. 7
The Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), established one year later in 1997, also
emerged as a central force in promoting the backlash against the implementation of
Kōno’s promises, and quickly grew into the largest right-wing political organization in
Japan, with Abe Shinzō and many key ruling party politicians playing central roles in
its activities.8 By 2014 none of Japan’s authorised history textbooks included any
information on the ‘comfort women’ issue.
During the first Abe administration, the Japanese government revised its
interpretation of the issue to insist that there had been no forcible recruitment of‘comfort women’ ‘in the narrow sense of the word’. 9
During the second Abe administration (2012-2020), the Japanese government’s
official position (despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary10) was that ‘nodescription directly showing forcible removal [of comfort women] by the army orgovernment officials can be found’.11
At a press conference in 2014, Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide (now Japan’sPrime Minister), stated that this applied even to the Semarang case, where Dutch
women were marched straight from an internment camp into a military ‘comfort
station’.12
In 2014, Suga oversaw a review of the background to the issuing of the Kōno
Statement. This review cast doubt on the validity of key parts of the Statement, andseriously discredited its contents in the eyes of the Japanese public. 13
Also in 2014, sections of the media (notably, the Sankei newspaper group) and otherlobby groups launched a fierce assault on media and journalists who had reported
sympathetically on the ‘comfort women’ issue. Some of these journalists
experienced severe online harassment and death threats. The result was a worrying
stifling of debate on the issue in Japanese media and in some sections of academia. 14‘STRATEGIC OVERSEAS DISSEMINATION’ AND THE ‘COMFORT WOMEN’ ISSUE••

In 2014-2015, the Japanese ruling Liberal Democratic Party and government
developed a new policy on ‘strategic overseas dissemination’ (senryakuteki taigai
hasshin).
A key body involved in the formulation of this policy was the LDP’s International
Information Investigation Committee (Kokusai Jōhō Kentō Iinkai), headed byparliamentarian (later Minister for the Environment) Harada Yoshiaki. This committee
was set up in March 2014 to ‘focus on investigating the propaganda activities of China
and South Korea in the United States’, and to consider ways to ‘invigorate Japan’s own
information dissemination strategy’. 15 As Harada stated, the position of the
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International Information Investigation Committee on the two most contentious
aspects of the Japan’s wartime history was that ‘there was no Nanjing Massacre’, andthat ‘there may have been “comfort women” as a social system, but it is not a factthat the state forced them into military facilities’.16
Another important body was the Headquarters for Studying History and Thinking
about the Future (Rekishi o Manabi Mirai o Kangaeru Honbu), established within the
LDP in November 2015. This body was answerable directly to Prime Minister Abe, andwas headed by Tanigaki Sadakazu, generally regarded as a liberal within the party. 17
However, a central figure in the establishment of the Headquarters was the morehawkish Chair of the LDP’s Policy Research Council, Inada Tomomi, who explained its
purpose as follows: ‘to re-examine history from an objective perspective and escapefrom the Tokyo Trials view of history’.18
Until 2015, the Japanese government had a quite modest budget for what it calls‘strategic overseas dissemination’ (senryakuteki taigai hasshin), running at around 20
billion yen (US$ 165 million) a year; but in 2015, this budget line jumped to 41.2 billion(about $ 341 million).19 By 2018, it had risen further to 59 billion yen (about $518
million).20
This budget is used to support general cultural diplomacy projects (the building of‘Japan Houses’, cultural and academic exchanges etc.). However, an important part ofits purpose is also to convey to the world the government’s image of ‘Japan’s correct
stance / the true nature of Japan’ (Nihon no tadashii sugata) on issues of territory(particularly the Senkaku/Diaoyu issue) and history (particularly the ‘comfort women’issue). One way of doing this is through the ‘cultivation of cohorts who are proJapanese and knowledgeable about Japan’ (shinnichiha, chinichiha no ikusei). 21
The problem with the application of this funding to the ‘comfort women’ issue is that
the Japanese government is using its taxpayers’ money to try to persuade the rest of
the world of a version of history which, though strongly espoused by certain politicalgroups in Japan, is by no means accepted by all Japanese citizens, and is contradictedby the work of almost all experts on the issue. Besides, this version of history directly
contradicts the factual contents and the promises of the 1993 Kōno Statement: astatement which the Japanese government has never officially rescinded.
As senior Ministry of Foreign Affairs official Andō Toshihide explained to a session of
the Lower House Foreign Affairs Committee in 2017, the government likes to put a‘cushion’ between itself and the history related events which it supports. To do this,
it focuses on ‘cultivating’ foreigners who are ‘pro-Japanese / knowledgeable about
Japan’ and on supporting overseas NGOs and think-tanks etc. as a means to channel
its views to an international audience. 22
An important part of the strategy for communicating the Japanese government’s viewof the ‘comfort women’ issue and related historical issues to overseas audiences has
therefore been support for seminars and other network building activities carried out
via a range of think-tanks and similar organizations at home and abroad. In 2015, for

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example, 4.8 billion yen (around US$44 million) was spent on communicating ‘Japan’scorrect stance’, of which, 970 million yen (over $8 million) was paid directly tooverseas think-tanks to ‘strengthen collaboration’. 23 Funding also goes to Japanese
think-tanks for the same purpose. The aim (as Foreign Minister Kishida emphasised in2016) was not simply to cultivate individuals sympathetic to Japan’s position on
territorial and history issues, but also to help these individuals form international
networks.24
Examples of the use of funding to project ‘Japan’s correct stance / the true nature ofJapan’ include the use of funding from the supplementary budget to finance a Japan
Chair at the Hudson Institute, a conservative US think tank founded by Herman Kahn.
The chair was established in 2019. In 2013, Prime Minister Abe had received theHerman Kahn Award from the same institute. As Japan’s Foreign Minister Kōno Tarōobserved at the time, ‘at present, in relation to various events taking place ininternational society, it is effective to promote understanding of Japan in internationalsociety by carrying out overseas dissemination from the standpoint of a third party
who has a correct understanding of Japan. With this in mind, we wish to establish achair related to Japan here [at the Hudson Institute]’.25
In many cases, though, the precise use made of ‘overseas dissemination’ funding is
opaque. In 2015, for example, funds from Japan’s strategic overseas disseminationbudget helped to support 107 seminars internationally,26 but, as a Ministry of Foreign
Affairs spokesperson explained, ‘in relation to such seminars, given the nature ofthings, there are actually numerous cases where it is not necessarily desirable for the
involvement of the Japanese government to become known. Among these, there arealso occasions when supportive think-tanks run multiple seminars with theappearance that there is no financial support from the Japanese government.’ 27

PRIVATE LOBBY GROUPS••

The period since the late 1990s, and particularly since the start of the second Abegovernment, has seen the proliferation of a mass of interlocking private lobby groups
supporting the domestic and international projection of the view that there was noforced recruitment of ‘comfort women’. Many of these groups also deny the Nanjing
Massacre and reject what they call the ‘Tokyo Trials view of history’. Some have close
ties to politicians in the LDP and other right-of-centre parties. These groups are too
numerous and complex to document in full, but I shall just give a few examples here.
The Shōheijuku (literally translated, ‘Victorious Soldier Academy’) is one of a numberof such ‘Academies’ which flourish in Japan – an academy, in this sense, being an
association of politicians, business leaders, public figures and others who get together
regularly to take part in seminars or lecture series, often led by a prominent
entrepreneur or social thinker. The core philosophy of the Shōheijuku is its founderMotoya Toshio’s desire to free Japan from its ‘masochistic view of history’ (jigyaku

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shikan) and revive ‘a Japan to be proud of’. 28 Motoya is founder and head of the APA
Hotel Group, one of Japan’s largest hotel chains, and is believed to be among therichest men in Japan.29
The Shōheijuku has about 200 ‘special scholars’ (tokutaisei), sixty-nine of whom areparliamentarians, of whom fifty-nine represent the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.30
A particularly active figure in this group is Harada Yoshiaki, the LDP politician who
founded and headed the party’s International Information Investigation Committee,
and who has been a lecturer or panellist at Shōheijuku monthly meetings 45 times
since 2013.31
In September 2015, as the Japanese government’s new taigai hasshin strategy was
taking shape, Harada took part in a published discussion with APA’s Motoya Toshio, in
which the two discussed the projection of Japan’s views of history to the world.
Motoya suggested the use of marketing companies, and argued the need to ‘consider
secret funds or donations from private citizens. It is not necessarily right to make allof these things open.’ 32 Motoya later claimed that he had hired a US public relations
company to spread his views of history internationally33, although this is difficult toconfirm.
Motoya’s vision of modern history as expressed in his discussion with Harada is thatJapan only went to war with the US because ‘Japan made enemies of the Jewish
people’ through its strategies of railway building in Manchuria. Since (according toMotoya) Jewish people ‘have gained control of worldwide media, finance, andmarketing… Japan should leverage the power of the Jewish people… All influential
marketing companies are funded by Jewish people. Japan should ask these American
marketing companies to undertake publicity activities overseas and also in Japan.’ Thispower, he argues, should then be used to promote the view that ‘World War II was adefensive war’, the Nanjing Massacre never happened, and the dropping of the atomic
bombs was a crime against humanity which (he appears to believe) exceeded those of
Nazi Germany – ‘even Adolf Hitler didn’t do things like slaughtering hundreds ofthousands of civilians with no warning’ (sic).34 Motoya goes on to claim that the US
possesses documentary evidence showing that the ‘comfort women’ were ‘simple
wartime prostitutes’, but deliberately conceals this because ‘denying it [i.e. the forced
recruitment of ‘comfort women’] would mean losing the legitimacy of its reasons for
dropping the atomic bombs’.35
The APA Group also supports networking around history issues through a wide rangeof other activities, including offering very well-funded book and essay prizes, whose
recipients are key members of groups engaged in their own private international
dissemination of neo-nationalist visions of history. For example, LDP parliamentarianand energetic denier of the forced recruitment of ‘comfort women’ Sugita Mio
received a 2014 APA Group Prize for True Interpretations of History, valued at three
million yen (about US$25,000), as a reward for a very short essay (published in English

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and Japanese) entitled ‘The Comfort Women and Abnormal Reporting that Underlies
this Issue’.36
The APA Group also gives an even more generous book prize, the APA Japan Revival
Prize, valued at ten million yen (roughly US$95,000), to books which disseminate
views of history close to its own. Recipients have included Moteki Hiromichi, Sugihara
Seishirō and Ara Kenichi.37 Sugihara is a former head of the Japan Society for History
Textbook Reform (Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho o Tsukuru Kai), one of the earliest groups
demand a stop to school teaching about the ‘comfort women’ issue. He is also anadvisor to the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact (Shijitsu o Sekai ni
Hasshin suru Kai, SDHF, established in 2015), which specialises in disseminating
material in English denying the Nanjing Massacre and the forced recruitment of‘comfort women’,38 and Chair of the International Research Institute of Controversial
Histories (iRich, est. 2013), which focuses on distributing English language denialist
literature on the ‘comfort women’ issue to the United Nations and related bodies. 39
His Deputy Chair is Sugita Mio’s collaborator and co-author Yamamoto Yumiko (seebelow). In addition to his Japan Revival Prize, Sugihara received a special APA Group
Prize for True Interpretations of History in 2013. Ara is an advisor to the ‘Society for
the Restoration of Sovereignty’ (Shuken Kaifuku o Mezasu Kai), established in 2006,
whose main argument is that the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty deprived Japan ofits sovereignty, and that this sovereignty must be regained so that Japan can embark
on major military expansion. 40 Moteki Hiromichi, who shared the 2019 prize with
Sugihara and Ara, is a Senior Research Fellow of iRich (of which Sugihara is President),and Deputy Chair of the SDHF (of which Sugihara is an advisor).
The international networking of private lobby groups and think-tanks in Japan and the
US is well illustrated by the case of the Global Alliance for Historical Truth (Rekishi no
Shinjitsu o Motomeru Sekai Rengōkai, GAHT), another denialist group, founded in2014 in both Japan and the US to ‘protect the honour of Japan’. 41 GAHT was thecentral force in the campaign against a comfort women memorial erected in Glendale,
California, in 2013. It is frequently presented to the public as being a US-based
initiative by local Japanese-American residents: ‘a nonprofit organization created by
Koichi Mera, a Glendale resident, and other Japanese Americans’.42 In fact, though, it
is a joint venture in which a very energetic Japanese wing is driven by a range ofdenialist figures including Sugihara Seishirō and Fujii Genki (also spelled Fujii Gemki,
and also known as Fujii Noboru). 43
Fujii is a Harvard graduate and founder of the Cambridge Forecast Group of Japan(linked to the US-based Cambridge Forecast Group). He has dedicated much of his
career to creating links between right wing politics in Japan and the US. Together with
Aeba Hiroaki (also known as Aeba Jikidō, a prominent figure in the political wing of
the new religion Happy Science), Fujii is a central figure in the Japanese Conservative
Union (known since 2020 as CPAC Japan) which is the Japanese partner of the US
Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

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Happy Science has played a central role in driving campaigns against ‘comfort women’
memorials in Australia and elsewhere 44 , and Fujii has written or contributed to anumber of articles in the Happy Science newsletter, praising former US President
Donald Trump and touting ‘deep state’ conspiracy theories. 45 At the 2021 CPAC
conference, Fujii presented a sensational video depicting Trump as a ‘modern
samurai’, which raised eyebrows even amongst the Conference’s conservative
audience.46 These connections highlight the fact that historical denial activists in Japanderived great comfort and energy from the Trump Presidency and the rise of rightwing populist groups in the US during that presidency.
A more academic form of international networking is illustrated by the exchange
programs run by Reitaku University, a relatively small private university established in1935 by Hiroike Chikuro, whose ‘Institute of Moralogy’ retains a close connection to
the university.47 ‘Moralogy’ is a form of business ethics centred on syncretic religious
ideas. By 2000, the Institute of Moralogy had become closely aligned with the aims of
the right-wing Nippon Kaigi, whose fifth anniversary was celebrated by the current
Institute of Moralogy President, Hiroike Mototaka, with a warm message of support
lamenting the era since the end of the Pacific War as Japan’s ‘lost fifty years’, andcalling for an end to ‘masochistic history education’. 48
In 2016, a group led by Reitaku University professors Nishioka Tsutomu and Takahashi
Shirō established the ‘Historical Awareness Research Committee’ (Rekishi Ninshiki
Mondai Kenkyūkai), based on the university campus. The Committee’s publications
focus on denying the forced recruitment of ‘comfort women’ and other wartime
labourers, denying the reality of the Nanjing Massacre and criticizing the Tokyo War
Crimes trials for giving Japanese people a ‘masochistic view of history’.49 Nishioka wasa founding member of the Japan Society for History Textbook Reform and is a key
figure in Nippon Kaigi, while Takahashi is (inter alia) a special fellow of iRich.50
In 2016, Reitaku University signed an agreement with a non-profit body, the Japan
Global Initiative, which promotes exchanges between US and Japanese students, thus
becoming one of just four Japanese universities to have such an agreement. The
agreement enables it to fund US students to take programs at Reitaku University, andReitaku students to undertake programs in Washington DC, where they study English
and network with a range of people in the DC educational and political worlds.51

THE RECEPTION OF THE RAMSEYER ‘COMFORT WOMEN’ ARTICLE AND JAPAN’S RETREATFROM THE KŌNO STATEMENT••The Ramseyer ‘comfort women’ article appeared at a time when a new upsurge ofdebate about the ‘comfort women’ and the Kōno Statement was developing in Japan.
In March 2020, Japan’s ‘textbook wars’ broke out again, when the Japanese Ministryof Education announced the results of the screening processes through which all
textbooks must pass if they are to be accepted for official use in Japanese school

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classrooms. For the first time since 2013, a Middle School history textbook containing
a very brief mention of the ‘comfort women’ issue was authorised for use in schools.
This textbook, compiled by Yamakawa Publishing Co., contains this sentence (in thecontext of a discussion of the Asia-Pacific War): ‘women from Korea, China, thePhilippines etc. were brought together (atsumerareta) in “comfort facilities” set up in
the war zones (the so-called “military comfort women”)’. This might not seem terribly
controversial, since it does not specify who set up the ‘comfort facilities’, who brought
the women together, how they were brought together, or for what purpose.52 But it
evoked a fierce response from neo-nationalist groups, with the right-wing Sankei
Newspaper (so often central to these debates) and the Japan Society for History
Textbook Reform leading the charge to demand a change to the outcome of thescreening.
The focus of their protests is the use of the term ‘so-called “military comfort women”’(iwayuru ‘jūgun ianfu’). The word ‘jūgun’ literally means ‘attached to the military’, andcritics argue that its use in the textbook ‘induces the misconception that comfort
women, like war correspondents, were under the direct management of themilitary.’53 An intense campaign by a coalition of right-wing groups then began to get
the Ministry of Education to remove the word ‘jūgun’.
This campaign is not simply about a word in a textbook. Since the expression ‘so-called“military comfort women”’ appears in the 1993 Kōno Statement, far right politicians
are also using this ‘correction of language’ issue as a lever to try to get the Sugaadministration explicitly to renounce the Kōno Statement (something that it has so far
refused to do since, since it is clearly aware of the huge diplomatic backlash that thiswould unleash, not least from the US).54 Questions posed in the Diet by right-wing
parliamentarians have even argued that the term ‘military comfort women’ was not
in use until it appeared in the Kōno Statement. This is completely incorrect – a word
search of the Nikkei Telecom newspaper database indicates that the term had beenused in media articles over 4000 times before August 1993. Nonetheless, some of thecritics of the term have urged the government to ‘be courageous’ in rolling back the
Kōno Statement.55
As the protests reached a peak at the beginning of this year, Professor Ramseyer’s
article on the ‘comfort women’ dropped into the laps of nationalist campaign groups
like manna from heaven. One of the first groups to leap to Ramseyer’s defence was
the Reitaku University based Historical Awareness Research Council, whose members
had already established connections to Ramseyer’s work as early as January 2019. 56
On 8 February 2021, just as protests against the article were emerging, the ResearchCouncil’s Vice President, along with five other members, wrote to the editors of theIRLE, strongly supporting Ramseyer’s ‘persuasive’ research and urging them to resist
calls for the article’s retraction.
On 24 February 2021, a group of neo-nationalist organizations including the Societyfor History Textbook Reform and the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact

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organized an ‘Emergency Gathering to Stop the Reappearance of Mention of the“Military Comfort Women” in Middle School Textbooks’. Five parliamentarians
including Harada Yoshiaki and Sugita Mio made presentations at the gathering
denouncing the idea that there was any forcible recruitment of ‘comfort women’.
Speeches at this gathering (for example, by LDP politician Takaichi Sanae) also
highlighted the role of the Kōno Statement in promoting the use of the term ‘military
comfort women’.57
One of the two keynote speeches at the gathering was given by Yamamoto Yumiko,
for long a central figure in claims that ‘comfort women’ were merely prostitutes.
Under the name Sakura Yumiko, Yamamoto was previously a central figure in the
Zaitokukai, a well-known Japanese ‘hate speech’ group. She now heads a group known
in Japanese as Nadeshiko Action and in English as ‘Japanese Women for Justice andPeace’58, and is active in a number of other action groups including iRich.
Yamamoto Yumiko’s keynote address consisted in its entirety of a detailed explicationof Ramseyer’s ‘scholarly analysis’ of ‘comfort women’ contracts. 59 She has also given
separate lectures expounding Ramseyer’s theory that ‘comfort women’ signed
contracts on the basis of ‘credible commitments’, and revealing the ‘discovery’ of a1991 article in which Ramseyer wrote about the use of contracts in prostitution inearly twentieth century Japan.60 These lectures are broadcast to viewers on the video
channel run by the Japan Society for History Textbook Reform.61 Many other of the‘comfort women’ denialist groups and their allies have also mobilized the article for
their cause. For example, the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact, iRich,and the Global Alliance for Historical Truth have all posted articles in English andJapanese on their websites, arguing that Ramseyer’s article is proof positive that there
was no forced recruitment of ‘comfort women’.

JAPANESE POLITICS AND THE RAMSEYER ARTICLE••

The campaign by various groups around the textbook issue has had a little-noticed but
significant effect in prompting a further retreat by the Japanese government from the
Kōno Statement. One symptom of this was the fact that the Foreign Ministry has
quietly removed the text of the Kōno Statement from its website. Another was a new
government pronouncement on the language surrounding the ‘comfort women’ issue.
Until last year, ruling party politicians and ministers themselves, including then Prime
Minister Abe, had used the terms ‘military comfort women’ or ‘so-called “military
comfort women”’. 62 But in March 2021, Chief Cabinet Secretary Katō Katsunobu
stated in the Diet that ‘in recent years’ the Japanese government had ceased to use
the term ‘military comfort women’, and now only uses the term ‘comfort women’. 63
At the same session, though, Prime Minister Suga stated that the Japanese
government’s ‘fundamental position’ is that it ‘inherits the Statement made by the

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Chief Cabinet Secretary on 4 August 1993’ and that ‘as a government, we are notconsidering revising’ this statement.64
Interpreted, what this means is that the Japanese government, while nominally‘inheriting’ the Kōno Statement, is further gutting its content, so that the government
now not only denies the role of the military in running ‘comfort stations’ and denies
the use of coercion in the recruitment of women, but intends to remove the very term
‘military comfort women’ from official discourse. Far from engraving the memory ofthese issues in the nation’s consciousness, it is engaged in a policy of trying to engravein national and international consciousness the false memory that there was no stateor military involvement in any forcible or coercive recruitment of ‘comfort women’,and that the ‘comfort women’ were not ‘controlled by’ or ‘attached to’ the military.
In this context, it is important to note that on 1 March 2021, the LDP announced themain focuses of its actions for the rest of the year, with one of its core aims being tostrengthen diverse methods of strategic overseas dissemination in relation to the‘history wars’.65
The dissemination of Ramseyer’s article within Japan at this important moment in theevolution of the issue may be fortuitous, but the potential role of the article as aweapon in these debates has not been overlooked by politicians.
For example, LDP parliamentarian and Shōheijuku ‘special scholar’ Aoyama Shigeharu
raised the issue of Ramseyer’s article in a meeting of the LDP Foreign Affairs andSecurity Section’s Foreign Affairs and Security Research Committee, which was heldon 9 February and chaired by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Satō Masahisa.
Aoyama has also posted articles in English and Japanese on his website, arguing that
Ramseyer’s article is proof that there was no forced recruitment of ‘comfort women’.
At the 9 February meeting, Aoyama asked what the government was doing to protect
Professor Ramseyer from criticism by Koreans and others. Aoyama noted that a
number of participants in the meeting were already clearly already aware of theRamseyer article when he posed his question, and that the atmosphere in the meeting
became tense, with one Ministry of Foreign Affairs official who was present busily
taking notes as he spoke. His conclusion from the responses he received was that theJapanese government felt unable to become publicly involved in the issue, but wasworking to support Ramseyer ‘beneath the surface’. Aoyama, in the video blog where
he reported the events of this meeting, went on to urge his supporters to write toHarvard defending Ramseyer from criticism, and even gave them helpful suggestions
as to how to phrase their messages – saying that they should write them in simple
English, using expressions like ‘Mr. Ramseyer is doing good work’. 66

SOME CONCLUSIONS•

Current developments around the ‘comfort women’ issue and the Kōno
Statement need to be monitored closely in the context of rising political tensions

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in East Asia and escalating efforts by the Japanese government to influence
overseas views of history.
The case of the Ramseyer article highlights the risks of scholarship being‘weaponized’ for political purposes.
It is, of course, inevitable that political groups will take up and quote academic
research which suits their purposes, but this makes it more than ever essential foruniversities, scholarly journals etc to ensure that the material they produce isbased on rigorous scholarly standards.
Universities need to ensure that they have effective systems in place to protect
against research misconduct in the humanities and social sciences, while also
firmly protecting freedom of speech.
Academic publishers need to re-examine their peer review processes to ensure
the scholarly integrity of the work they publish. Professor Ramseyer’s contentious
articles appear to been published because they had been submitted to theoryfocused journals, and were never reviewed by scholars with the appropriate areastudies knowledge. This points to important flaws in the current peer review
process.
More broadly, this story highlights the problem of our ability to preserve memory
and truth in a rapidly changing international environment. At a time when mostpolitical and media attention is focused on very real concerns about the rising
power of China, we need, more urgently than ever, to have a deep understandingof unfolding trends in all the countries of the Indo-Pacific, because this is ageopolitical shift that contains multiple moving parts in many places. And we needto remember that ultimately this is not a story about Harvard professors or
Korean protestors or Japanese politicians and lobby groups. It is about a very large
number of woman who suffered sexual violence in war, and whose story – alongwith the story of other who suffered similarly in other wars and places – must be
remembered if we are ever to learn anything from the past.

12

NOTES
1 J. Mark Ramseyer, ‘Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War’, International Review of Law and Economics,

published online 1 December 2020.
2 For example, ‘Letter by Concerned Economists Regarding “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War” in theInternational Review of Law and Economics’, signed (as of 19 March 2021) by 3482 economists http://chwe.net/irle/letter/ (accessed 20 March 2021); Jeannie Suk Gersen, ‘Seeking the True Story of the
Comfort Women’, New Yorker, 25 February 2021; Amy Stanley et al., ‘”Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War”:
The Case for Retraction on Grounds of Academic Misconduct’, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, vol. 19,
issue 5, no. 13, 1 March 2021, https://apjjf.org/2021/5/ConcernedScholars.html (accessed 5 March 2021);
Fight for Justice / Japan Society for Historical Studies (Rekishigaku Kenkyūkai) and others, ‘Aratana Yosōi deArawareta Nihongun “Ianfu” Hiteiron o Hihan suru Nihon no Kenkyūsha, Akutibisuto no Kinkyū Seimei’, on thewebsite of the Japan Society for Historical Studies, 16 March 2021 - http://www.nihonshiken.jp/ (accessed 19
March 2021).
3 Particularly, J Mark Ramseyer, J. Marck Ramseyer, ‘A Monitoring Theory of the Underclass, With Examples
from Outcastes, Koreans, and Okinawans in Japan’, posted on Professor Ramseyer’s Harvard publications page,https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/10697/Ramseyer/publications (accessed 20 February 2021); J. Mark
Ramseyer, ‘On the Invention of Identity Politics: The Buraku Outcastes in Japan’, Review of Law and Economics,
volume 16, issue 2, 2020; J. Mark Ramseyer, ‘Social Capital and the Problems of Opportunistic Leadership: The
Example of Koreans in Japan’, European Journal of Law and Economics, 18 February 2021 (currently under rereview by the journal). For critical responses, see International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination
and Racism, ‘Statement: “Problem of Ramseyer’s Article on Buraku: From the Perspective of Human Rights and
Non-Discrimination’, on the website of the International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination andRacism, https://imadr.org/statement-buraku-discrimination-march2021/ (accessed 21 March 2021); ‘Shasetsu:
Bei Kyōju Okinawa Hihan Ronbun – Sabetsu Ishiki to Kimetsuke to’, editorial in the Okinawa Times, 1 March
2021, https://www.okinawatimes.co.jp/articles/-/714346 (accessed 10 March 2021);
4 J. Mark Ramseyer, ‘Japan in 2020: Making Sense of Professors in Overwhelmingly Insular American
Universities’, Japan Forward, 4 January 2020, https://japan-forward.com/japan-in-2020-making-sense-ofprofessors-in-overwhelmingly-insular-american-universities/
5 For the full text of the document, see ‘On the Issue of Wartime “Comfort Women”’, 4 August 1993, in the
Digital Museum: The Comfort Women and the Asian Women’s Fund, https://www.awf.or.jp/e6/statement03.html (accessed 17 March 2021).
6 For the full text, see ‘Statement by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono on the Result of the Study on the Issueof "Comfort Women"’, 4 August 1993, in the Digital Museum: The Comfort Women and the Asian Women’sFund, https://www.awf.or.jp/e6/statement-02.html (accessed 13 March 2021)
7 As explained by fellow association member Takaichi Sanae in her address to the Emergency Gathering to Stop
the Reappearance of Mention of the “Military Comfort Women” in Middle School Textbooks, Tokyo, 24
February 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RkdVHrZiHk (accessed 19 March 2021).
8 See Tawara Yoshifumi, ‘What is the Aim of Nippon Kaigi, the Ultra-Right Organization that Supports Japan’s
Abe Administration?’ The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, volume 15, Issue 21, No. 1, November 2017,https://apjjf.org/2017/21/Tawara.html (accessed 15 March 2021).
9 See, for example, reply by Prime Minister Abe Shinzō to a question in the Budgetary Committee of the Upper
House of the Japanese Diet, 5 March 2007, in the online official record of the Japanese Diet (Kokkai Gijiroku) https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/#/.
10 For discussions of this evidence, see, for example, Yoshiaki Yoshimi (trans. Susan O’Brien), Comfort Women:
Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II, New York, Columbia University Press, 2000;
Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US
Occupation, London, Routledge, 2002; Peipei Qiu et al., Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperialjapan’s Sex Slaves, Vancouver, UBC Press, 2013; C. Sarah Soh, ‘Teikoku Nihon no “Gun Ian Seido” Ron: Rekishi
to Kioku no Seijiteki Kattō’, in Kurosawa Aiko et al eds., Iwanami Kōza Ajia Taiheyō Sensō, Vol. 2: Sensō noSeijigaku, Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, 2005, pp. 347-374, see particularly pp. 364-370; Bart van Poelgeest, ‘Reportof a Study of Dutch Government Documents on the Forced Prostitution of Dutch Women in the Dutch East
Indies during the Japanese Occupation’, report to the Second Chamber of the States General, 24 October
1994; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, ‘You Don't Want to Know About the Girls? The 'Comfort Women', the JapaneseMilitary and Allied Forces in the Asia-Pacific War’, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, vol. 13, issue 31, no. 1,
3 August 2015, https://apjjf.org/2015/13/31/Tessa-Morris-Suzuki/4352.html (accessed 1 March 2021;

13

11 This terminology had first been used in a reply to a question by opposition parliamentarian Tsujimoto Kiyomi

in 1997, but came the standard LDP response to questions on the subject from 2012 onwards – see statement
by Shimomura Hirofumi to the Education and Science Committee of the Lower House of the Japanese Diet, 18
April 2012, in the online official record of the Japanese Diet. For a recent statement of this position, see thereply by the current Chief Cabinet Secretary, Katō Katsunobu, to a question in the Budgetary Committee of theLower House of the Japanese Diet, 8 February 2021, in the online official record of the Japanese Diet (Kokkai
Gijiroku).
12 Suga Yoshihide, press conference 5 September 2014; video available on the website of the Prime Minister’s
office: www.kantei.go.jp/tyokanpress/201409/5_p.html (accessed 18 September 2014 – cached).
13 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japan, ‘Details of Exchanges between Japan and the Republic of Korea Regarding
the Comfort Women Issue – From the Drafting of the Kono Statement to the Asian Women’s Fund: Provisional
Translation’, 20 June 2014; Martin Fackler, ‘Japan to Revisit Apology to Wartime Sex Slaves’, New York Times,
28 February 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/01/world/asia/japan-to-review-apology-made-to-wwiicomfort-women.html (accessed 8 May 2020).
14 See, for example, Tomomi Yamaguchi, ‘Press Freedom Under Fire: The Asahi Affair and Uemura Takashi’ inJeff Kingston ed. Press Freedom in Contemporary Japan, London and New York, Routledge, 2016, pp. 135-151.
15 ‘Jimin Kyō nimo Jōhō Kentōin: Chūkan Hannichi Senden Taisaku Hassoku’, Sankei Shinbun, 27 March 2014.
16 ‘Tōkyō Saiban, Nankin Daigyakusatsu – Jimin ga Kenshō Shinsoshiki’, Chūnichi Shimbun, 9 December 2015.
17 This history ‘HQ’ continued its work until it was abolished in October 2018, see ‘Jimin Sōsai Chokuzoku 5
Kikan Haishi: Seichō e no Kinō Shuyaku’, Shinano Shimbun, 16 October 2018.
18 Inada Tomomi, ‘Jimintō Seichō Kaichō, Inada Tomomi: ‘Dentō to Sōzō – Shakai no Kadai – Dekiru koto kara’,
Sankei Shimbun, 19 December 2015.
19 Statement by Minister of Foreign Affairs Kōno Tarō to the Security Committee of the Japanese Diet, 1
December 2017, in the online official record of the Japanese Diet (Kokkai Gijiroku); ‘Kokusai Kōhō no Aratana
Shuppatsuten’, Hokkoku Shimbun, 16 January 2015. US dollar estimations factor in changes in the exchangerate.
20 ‘Gaimushō Sannenburi Yosan 7000 Oku Koe’, Sankei Shimbun, 14 December 2018.
21 Statement by Foreign Minister Kishida Fumio to the Third Subcommittee of the Budgetary Committee of theLower House Japanese Diet, 10 March 2015, in the online official record of the Japanese Diet.
22 Andō Toshihide, replying to a question from parliamentarian Maruyama Hodaka during a session of theForeign Affairs Committee of the Lower House of the Japanese Diet, 30 March 2017, in the online official
record of the Japanese Diet.
23 Ōtaka Masato replying to a question by parliamentarian Maruyama Hodaka during a session of the Foreign
Affairs Committee of the Lower House of the Japanese Diet, 20 April 2016, in the online official record of theJapanese Diet.
24 Foreign Minister Kishida Fumio, addressing the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Lower House of the Diet, 18
May 2016, in the online official record of the Japanese Diet.
25 Foreign Minister Kōno Tarō, replying to a question by parliamentarian Adachi Shinya during a session of the
Budgetary Committee of the Lower House Japanese Diet, 6 February 2019, in the online official record of theJapanese Diet; see also the website of the Hudson Institute, https://www.hudson.org/policycenters/39-japanchair (accessed 14 March 2021).
26 Ōtaka Masato replying to a question by parliamentarian Maruyama Hodaka during a session of the Foreign
Affairs Committee of the Lower House of the Japanese Diet, 20 April 2016, in the online official record of theJapanese Diet.
27 Ōtaka Masato replying to a question by parliamentarian Maruyama Hodaka during a session of the Foreign
Affairs Committee of the Lower House of the Japanese Diet, 1 April 2016, in the online official record of theJapanese Diet.
28 See the website of the Shōheijuku - http://shoheijyuku.com/about (accessed 14 March 2021).
29 See the Forbes list of Japan’s richest people, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/japanbillionaires/list/#tab:overall (accessed 31 March 2021).
30 See the PDF list of lecturers and special scholars, downloadable from the academy’s website http://shoheijyuku.com/about (downloaded 15 March 2021)
31 See the list of Shōheijuku speakers on the Shōheijuku website - http://shoheijyuku.com/koushilist (accessed
16 March 2021).
32 Yoshiaki Harada and Toshio Motoya, ‘Strategy is Necessary for Transmitting Information Overseas: Can
Japan Utilize International News Agencies and Marketing Companies’, Apple Town (English Version),
September 2015, http://en.apa-appletown.com/bigtalk/227 (accessed 14 March 2021).

14

33 See Shiro Takahashi and Toshio Motoya, ‘Disseminating the Truth of Japan to the World in English’, Apple

Town, no. 360, January 2016, http://en.apa-appletown.com/bigtalk/360 (accessed 12 March 2021).
34 Harada and Motoya, ‘Strategy is Necessary for Transmitting Information Overseas’.
35 Harada and Motoya, ‘Strategy is Necessary for Transmitting Information Overseas’.
36 Mio Sugita ‘The Comfort Women and Abnormal Reporting that Underlies this Issue, 2013
http://ronbun.apa.co.jp/book_ronbun/vol7/einglish.html (accessed 15 March 2021).
37 See the official website of the APA Nihon Fukkō Zaidan - http://ronbun.apa.co.jp/ (accessed 15 March 2021).
38 See the website of the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact, http://www.sdh-fact.com/missionstatement/ (accessed 12 March 2021) and its list of Chairs and Advisors, http://www.sdh-fact.com/about-us/(accessed 12 March 2021).
39 See the iRich website, https://en.i-rich.org/ (accessed 17 March 2021).
40 See the Society’s website, http://shukenkaifuku.com/ (accessed 15 March 2021).
41 See the GAHT website, http://gaht.jp/ (accessed 18 March 2021), and the Association’s 2019 accounts,
downloadable from www.seikatubunka.metro.tokyo.lg.jp › list › ledger, accessed 18 March 2021. On GAHT andother denialist groups and individuals, see also the Japan-US Feminist Network for Decolonization’s online‘Encyclopedia’ of Japanese right-wing actors operating in the United States:
http://fendnow.org/encyclopedia/start/ (accessed 19 March 2021).
42 See Makiko Takita, ‘The Japanese Government Weighs in with the Supreme Court’, Japan Forward, 27
February 2017, https://japan-forward.com/the-japanese-government-weighs-in-with-the-supreme-court/
43 See the NPO official records of GAHT, where Fujii is listed as one of GAHT’s two official representatives,
https://www.npo-homepage.go.jp/npoportal/detail/013011585 (accessed 19 March 2021).
44 Ben Hills, ‘A Fight to Remember’, SBS News (Australia), 31 March 2017,https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/voices/feature/fight-remember (accessed 15 March 2021).
45 See http://eng.the-liberty.com/2017/6827/; http://eng.the-liberty.com/2017/6845/ (accessed 18 March
2021).
46 Sirena Bergman, ‘Bizarre Video claiming Trump is the “Real American Samurai” Leaves People Baffled after it
was Shown at CPAC’, Indy 100/ the Independent, 27 February 2021, https://www.indy100.com/news/trumpsamurai-cpac-video-b1808410 (accessed 18 March 2021).
47 See the Institute’s website, https://www.engmoralogy.jp/history (accessed 21 March 2021).
48 For the full text of this message, see the website of the Nippon Kaigi,
http://www.nipponkaigi.org/voice/5years/kakkai#years561 (accessed 21 March 2021).
49 See the Research Committee’s website, http://harc.tokyo/?cat=6 (accessed 21 March 2021).
50 See the list of office bearers on the website of iRich: https://i-rich.org/?page_id=73 (accessed 21 March
2021).
51 See the list on the website of the Japan Global Initiative: https://jgi.or.jp/visit/ (accessed 21 March 2021).
52 ‘“Jūgun Ianfu” Koshō Fukatsu: Chūgaku Kyōkasho Kentei, Jigyakushiki Tsuyomeru’, Sankei Shimbun, 25
March 2020.
53 ‘Why the Resurgence of the Term “Military Comfort Women” in Our Textbooks’, Japan Forward, 15 April
2020, https://japan-forward.com/why-the-resurgence-of-the-term-military-comfort-women-in-our-textbooks/(accessed 16 March 2021).
54 See statements by Isshin no Kai parliamentarian Fujita Fumitake and by Prime Minister Suga to the
Budgetary Committee of the Lower House of the Japanese Diet, 8 February 2021, in the online official recordof the Japanese Diet.
55 See, for example, questions by Ishin no Kai parliamentarian Fujita Fumitake during a session of the
Budgetary Committee of the Lower House of the Diet, 8 February 2021, in in the online official record of theJapanese Diet (Kokkai Gijiroku).
56 Reitaku University Professor and regular Research Council contributor Jason Morgan had interviewed
Ramseyer for Japan Forward on 21 January 2019 – see Jason Morgan, ‘Harvard Professor Mark Ramseyer Asks,“What’s Gotten into the Korean Judiciary”’, Japan Forward, 31 January 2019; also in July 2019, Ramseyer had
presented Reitaku University’s 2nd Annual Global Seminar, see https://www.reitakuu.ac.jp/news/research/69910/ (accessed 20 March 2021).
57 See the video of Takaichi’s address to the to the Emergency Gathering to Stop the Reappearance of Mentionof the “Military Comfort Women” in Middle School Textbooks, Tokyo, 24 February 2021,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RkdVHrZiHk&list=PLiXt8iD2VFIU3X-dvkdfisWWg9qQAVR7t&index=5,(accessed 19 March 2021).
58 See Jackie J. Kim-Wachutka, ‘Hate Speech in Japan: PatrioticWomen, Nation and Love of Country’, in
Myungkoo Kang et al eds., Hate Speech in Japan and Europe, London and New York, Routledge,2020; also J.

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Kim-Wachutka, ‘When Women Perform Hate Speech: Gender, Patriotism, and Social Empowerment in Japan’,
The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, vol. 17, issue 11, no. 1, June 2019, https://apjjf.org/2019/11/KimWachutka.html (accessed 20 March 2021).
59 Yamamoto Yumiko, ‘Hābādo Daigaku Ramseyer Kyōju 2021 to 1991 no Futatsu no Ronbun’, keynote address
to the Emergency Gathering to Stop the Reappearance of Mention of the “Military Comfort Women” in Middle
School Textbooks, Tokyo, 24 February 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v_SgCeH99s (accessed 16
March 2021).
60 The article in question is J. Mark Ramseyer, ‘Indentured Prostitution in Imperial Japan: Credible
Commitments in the Commercial Sex Industry’, Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, 1991, vol. 7, no.
1, pp. 89-116.
61 Yamamoto Yumiko ‘Ramseyer Ronbun ga Akiraka ni shita Ianfu Mondai no Shinsō 1’, Tsukurukai CH, 19
February 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWxvxAJOc2U
62 Reply by Education Minister Hagiuda to a question in the Education and Science Committee of the Lower
House of the Japanese Diet, 4 June 2020, in the online official record of the Japanese Diet.
63 See statement by Chief Cabinet Secretary Katō during a session of the Budgetary Committee of the Lower
House Japanese Diet, 8 February 2021, in the online official record of the Japanese Diet.
64 See statement by Prime Minister Suga during a session of the Budgetary Committee of the Lower House
Japanese Diet, 8 February 2021, in the online official record of the Japanese Diet.
65 ‘Jimintō no Reiwa 3-sannen Undō Hōshinan no Gaiyō’, Sankei Shimbun, 1 March 2021.
66 Aoyama Shigeharu, ‘Boku no Kokkai, no. 111: Nyūsu no Shippo – Ianfu wa Seidorei dewa nai! Bei Hābādo
Dai Ramseyer Kyōju Ronbun no Hamon’ (video blog), 19 February 2021,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYCGjD9nWRs (accessed 9 March 2021).

16