Image caption: “Comfort women (comfort girls) captured by U.S. Army, August 14 1944, Myitkyina.” Image source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain. A noted American professor at Harvard Law School has been denounced both at home and internationally after publishing an academic paper arguing that claims about Korean women enslaved by Japanese military forces as “comfort women” during the second world war are historically untrue. Critics of the professor, J. Mark Ramseyer, who is the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, argue the paper ignores standard research methods, existing scholarship, and primary sources, and is full of inaccuracies and intentional misrepresentations. Ramseyer's paper, which is titled “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War,” will be published in the March 2021 print issue of the International Review of Law and Economics (IRLE), but is already available online to academic audiences. In the paper, Ramseyer characterizes the organized, methodical sexual slavery of approximately 200,000 women — so-called “comfort women” or ianfu (慰安婦) — by Japanese Imperial forces during the Second World War as a legitimate, contractual, economic exchange between willing participants. Ramseyer's paper repeats common tropes typically employed by historical revisionists who seek to minimize or erase sexual slavery practiced by Japan during the war. His conclusions contradict rigorous, established scholarship, including a comprehensive 1996 United Nations report on the issue. Ramseyer summarized the key points of the paper in a column published in late January in Japan Forward, an English-language opinion site for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners run by Sankei Shimbun, a hard-right Japanese daily. In his Japan Forward opinion column, Ramseyer states: …the claims about enslaved Korean comfort women are historically untrue. The Japanese army did not dragoon Korean women to work in its brothels. It did not use Korean women as sex slaves. The claims to the contrary are simply ー factually ー false. In the Japan Forward opinion piece, Ramseyer also argues that Korean women (in fact, women from more than ten occupied countries in Asia were forcibly conscripted) entered into a mutually agreeable contractual agreement with brothel operators that protected the rights of both parties. Following the publication of Ramseyer's Japan Forward column in late January, attention turned to the online version of his IRLE journal article, which was released in December 2020. Besides generating headlines in Korean media, the article sparked condemnation by students and faculty at Harvard University, where Ramseyer works. The Korean Association of Harvard Law School, a student group, issued a statement in response to Ramseyer's article, stating: Without any convincing evidence, Professor Ramseyer argues that no government “forced women into prostitution,” a contention he also makes in his editorial. Decades’ worth of Korean scholarship, primary sources, and third-party reports challenge this characterization. None are mentioned, cited, or considered in his arguments. Ramseyer was also publicly criticized by colleagues. In a Twitter thread, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a legal scholar and the first Asian woman and first Korean professor to teach at Harvard Law School, said: 4: I disagree with my colleague as deeply as it’s possible to disagree. For now, I’ll say I disagree with his interpretations of his sources, his wrong legal analysis, and even applying his own disciplinary terms, his reasoning fails. We talked, and he knows I disagree with him. — Jeannie Suk Gersen (@JeannieSGersen) February 7, 2021 In other public comments, Gersen called into question Ramseyer's interpretation of contract law, stating, “No legal system would recognize or justly enforce contract of this nature,” where people forced into sex in the context of Japanese military occupation in wartime were not free agents exercising agency. In the IRLE paper, for instance, Ramseyer argues a ten-year-old girl entered into a contract with full knowledge of what sex work entailed: When Osaki turned ten, a recruiter stopped by and offered her 300 yen upfront if she would agree to go abroad. The recruiter did not try to trick her; even at age 10, she knew what the job entailed. The critique of Ramseyer's interpretation of contract law is notable, since Ramseyer, as Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, is widely regarded as an expert on Japanese law and economics. In spite of his long connection to Japan, however, Ramseyer's curriculum vitae indicates no apparent expertise on the topic of wartime sexual slavery or East Asia.