If academia of the 2010s could have been described briefly, ‘insular’ or ‘hostile to heterodox thought’ are phrases that might come to mind. Perhaps it had always been this way, to varying degrees, but the shift toward a radical, hyper-liberal framework turned out to be so deeply pervasive across college campuses that everyone, even its sympathizers within mainstream media, eventually came to acknowledge its diminishing returns. During that decade, professors lost jobs, grad students lost advisors and undergrads were expelled, but never in such organized fashion or at such volume as to constitute a purge. Still, cancelings occurred with enough regularity to demonstrate that academia had credos and that these credos were never to be questioned.

Sometimes, however, these credos weren’t so obviously defined until some expert in a field, often analytically minded and otherwise ignorant of how radical the ideology of his peers had gotten, bumbles into a national controversy simply for publishing a paper. This is exactly what happened to J. Mark Ramseyer, a Harvard economics professor who spent his childhood in Japan, speaks and reads Japanese with native fluency, and published what is now a somewhat infamous paper looking into the statistics of state-regulated prostitution by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. He published this paper in 2021, a few years after another man, Jason M. Morgan, at the time a grad student, also took an interest in the comfort women narrative: that the Japanese Army kidnapped legions of women—specifically Korean women, and in the range of 200,000 by some estimates—and pressed them into sexual slavery for their front line troops during the same period of time.

These two men, one close to retiring from the academy and the other just aspiring to join it, both highly fluent in Japanese, both with direct access to the sources, records, monographs and research conducted on the subject and in the languages most sensible to that research, found themselves independently isolated, attacked, and slandered across social media to the point of nearly making national news. And at first, this canceling was spearheaded entirely by Western scholars. Fortunately, they survived the canceling with their careers largely intact, but their story is not a particularly rare one. The book they wrote together, The Comfort Women Hoax,details this struggle as well as the research on the comfort women phenomenon that initially sparked the outrage. But it also details the international scale of the comfort women narrative, how it’s not just a loose component of western-minded feminism in western liberal arts departments, and how it has been used as significant leverage in the ongoing geopolitical drama between Japan and America on the one side, and China and North Korea on the other, with South Korea’s own academies, institutions, newspapers, courts, and NGOs providing the battleground.

Comfort Women and Prostitution in Imperial Japan

At some point, probably around the late nineties, everyone suddenly knew that during World War Two, the Japanese army conducted mass conscription campaigns of women, specifically Korean women, into sexual slavery to service their front-line troops across their war in East Asia. Not uncommonly, large Western media outlets would speak of this phenomenon in the same breath as more notorious and, it turns out, much better documented atrocities committed during the war, such as the deliberate abuse of war prisoners, the 1937 sack of Nanjing, and the use of human experimentation in military research facilities.

Ramseyer and Morgan point out that comfort women narrative originated with a fake memoir written by Yoshida Seiji, a member of the Japanese Communist Party. As his book gained traction, Japanese investigators began to press Yoshida on errors throughout the book’s narrative which he claimed at first to have simply misremembered, only for the errors to compound to the point that he demanded, in his old age, that the memoir be considered a work of pure fiction. By then, however, the damage had already been done; the narrative took off, paper after paper and article after article began appearing in both journals and popular media. In an example of “Churnalism,” Ramseyer and Morgan write how “one document followed another, each repeating the earlier story, and none added any real independent evidence.”¹ Published in 1983, the Asahi Shimbun reviewed and interviewed Yoshida various times over the following decade, propagating his memoir and popularizing it in Japan even as native scholars had already begun picking it apart. But it wasn’t until it reached Korea in 1989 that the memoir became the seed of geopolitical conflict; a year later, activists formulated the Korean Council, and by 1991, demands for compensation from the Japanese government started.

The narrative that Yoshida’s book—and that the Asahi propagated at the time—was the simple one mentioned above: that armed Japanese troops went to remote villages, in this case Jeju, off the coast of Korea, and at bayonet and rifle point, kidnapped young women, brutalized them, and shipped them off to the front lines as sex slaves. Moreover, and just as importantly, Yoshida claimed that this was not the isolated action of a rogue squad of infantrymen, but rather an order from command sent to the labor office in Shimonoseki, where it was his duty to supervise the mobilization of Korean workers. The hoax at the heart of the narrative isn’t one regarding wartime acts of pillage and rape committed by savage cadres of brutish soldiers, such as in the case of the sack of Nanjing. The hoax is that the Imperial Japanese Army command specifically put into place a structure of sexual slavery whose chattel were Korean girls.

Ramseyer and Morgan, however, offer not just a completely different narrative in the second chapter of their book, but a more convincing one that includes statistics, figures, and quoted reports to back it up. They begin by tracking the fact that the Imperial Japanese Army understood the need to supply front line troops with some way of blowing off steam when they weren’t in direct combat. As Ramseyer notes,

During Japan’s 1918 Siberian expedition, the military had not designated brothels for its troops. Instead, individual soldiers had frequented local establishments as they chose. Many of them contacted venereal disease. Senda Kako located the medical records for one set of battalions. From August 1918 to October 1920, the units suffered 1,387 deaths and 2,066 injuries in battle. During the same period, these battalions suffered 2,012 reported cases of venereal disease. Senda estimates that they suffered many more cases that went unreported.²

This experience, he convincingly argues, was one of the things that prompted the IJA to institute the comfort station system during wartime operations: if your fighting force suffers the same number of men compromised by venereal disease as it does those injured in battle, some better solution to their behavior off the clock has to be found. And as it turns out, the solution was an obvious one for command, as pre-war Japan already had in place a system of government-regulated prostitution. They simply extended this service into regions near combat zones.

What the book makes clear is that this comfort station system was a regulated but not a government operated enterprise. These were private establishments run by licensees with documentation drawn up and above board. The women who worked at such establishments had contracts and entered into an indentured servitude agreement with their employers; the employer would advance a loan to her guarantor for a given amount, and she would in return work off the value of that loan at the brothel. Although contracts were capped at a maximum period of six years, regulations allowed women to quit the contract early if they satisfied the sum of the loan. For most women, this usually took only about three years, and again, most women left the industry at about that point.

Ramseyer also addresses an obvious counter-presumption about this ordeal, considering the nature of the industry and its reputation in media: that employers might have reason to renege on their contracts or manipulate its terms (with interest rates, for instance) in order to bind the women into a form of debt slavery. The figures regarding licensed prostitution in Japan, however, don’t reflect this, as “the data show comparable numbers entering and leaving the industry in a given year.”³ Additionally, as he makes clear with regard to the sensitive nature of the industry in question, the reputation of a brothel meant everything, and for what are hopefully obvious reasons. At the risk of further demoralizing employees whose entire way of keeping the brothel profitable was to make men very happy, any given brothel was greatly disincentivized to rely on means so underhanded to maintain its staff. And this is to say nothing about the fact that, callous as it may be to consider, there has never been at any time in the history of civilization a dearth of women willing to practice the world’s oldest profession; if a brothel owner needed to retain or expand his workforce, all he had to do was put out a call.

Nowhere do the authors claim that women were not at times tricked by duplicitous recruiters into prostitution. While this happened, the volume of women working as prostitutes, coupled with the fact that employers honored their contracts, indicate that while it probably wasn’t uncommon, it was hardly the main source of recruiting. And more to the point, naive young women from the country tricked into contracted sex work is quite a different narrative than villages’ worth of pubescent girls rounded up by soldiers and pressed into uncompensated sexual slavery—and then, apparently, slaughtered afterward.

The fact that such a well-documented phenomenon could have been so easily rewritten in public consciousness, and by such an unbelievable fake memoir at that, should indicate to the casual reader that there was some social or political interest in the new narrative. And indeed there was, as the authors note, but this interest was quite different in Asia compared to the form it would take in western academia.

The Global Politics of the Comfort Women Controversy

The Second Sino-Japanese War is as propagandized a subject in Asia as the European theater of World War Two is in the West, and for similar reasons. The war’s end resulted in radical restructuring of the political powers in the region. Although Japan maintained its monarchy and government, its military was effectively neutered and its expansionist aspirations crushed. Meanwhile, the wake of Manchukuo’s collapse, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, the occupation of the Korean peninsula by foreign powers at odds with one another, and the eventual resolution of the Chinese Civil War left that side of the continent virtually unrecognizable compared to just two decades beforehand.

As like in Europe, there was a collectively recognized boogeyman to be found in historical study. Like Germany, the Japanese army had been invasive, expansionist, tinged with a racialist and nationalist fervor that carried its flag many thousands of miles into territories not historically its own. But unlike in Europe, where the Germany of the NSDAP was totally dismantled politically, militarily, and even territorially, Japan was allowed to retain itself and its national character, broadly speaking, despite the change to its religion and the seemingly unending presence of American military forces. The balance of power in the East, however, as Mao consolidated China and Kim took the reigns of North Korea, guaranteed the transformation of these occupying forces into defensive guarantors pointed at a mutually recognized threat.

Japan, in other words, had been conquered, but it hadn’t been totally drawn and quartered. And across the sea, the Korean peninsula divided quickly and violently into a pair of mutually antagonistic dictatorships with mutually antagonistic backers. Likewise, the Japanese colonization of the peninsula remained within living memory, and any favor paid to Japan by a Korean perhaps understandably carried with it anti-nationalist sentiment. A Korean who preferred an American international alignment by proxy preferred an alignment with Japan as well, and by definition this alignment went against reunification. North Korean influence on this narrative should be fairly self-evident, considering how the issue is framed by the Korean left: America is holding up efforts at reunifying the Korean people; i.e. Koreans belong under the yoke of Juche. The reunification they speak of is not a mutually-agreed upon compromise of governing principles, politics and diplomacy but rather a zero-sum resolution in which any resemblance of the South Korean way of life ceases to exist.

In the book’s chapter on the scale of the comfort women narrative in Korea and Japan, Ramseyer and Morgan mention how the far-left Korean Council was formulated specifically to increase tensions between the two countries. They accomplished this throughout the 90s, 00’s and the early half of the 2010s by posing as an NGO dedicated to helping ex-comfort women spread their stories while also providing for them financial relief. Naturally, anything that could be done to realistically embellish the narrative was welcomed not just by the Council, but also by the press; one of the more prominent alleged victims of the comfort women regime, Lee Yong-soo, later admitted to “giving exactly the testimony they told me to give.”⁴

The Council used statements read by former comfort women as PR to press this narrative, and as Yoshida embellished his own story, they too embellished their own. Ramseyer and Morgan note the coordination and proximity maintained by the Council to the women, and in fact, dedicate a chapter to the Council and its show runner, Yoon Mee-hyang, a woman with ties to the North Korean regime that should be impossible to ignore. With these elements in mind, the importance of the comfort women narrative to the Korean peninsula becomes quite a bit clearer, and quite a bit bigger than a matter of alleging eighty-year-old wartime atrocities:

Yoon used the elderly women to push the Yoshida account and sabotage rapprochement with Japan. The North was pursuing its nuclear weapons program, and the last thing it wanted was a united front from Japan and south Korea. By endlessly repeating Yoshida’s claim that the Japanese army had forcibly conscripted Korean women, Yoon helped to block that rapprochement.⁵

The hoax’s unfolding over the nineties coincided perfectly with the Kim regime’s nuclear and missile programs advancing against the West’s wishes. The North’s interest in the case needs no clarification even if this hadn’t been the case; it served and still serves as a wedge to isolate the South from its geopolitical allies. The South’s political left also keeps the narrative alive, too, slamming researchers with fines and even prison time when they speak too critically against it.

Western Narcissism

A hemisphere away, the politicization of the comfort women narrative took on a character totally unrelated to the Cold War geopolitics of Japan, Korea and China. Instead, as it concerned women, prostitution, and Japan’s early-century nationalistic government, liberal feminism latched onto Yoshida Seiji’s narrative and refused to let go. Yoshida’s fake memoir should have immediately come across to any critically minded feminist as sounding a little too good for the cause to be true, but it’s possible that western academics were more willing to believe the narrative when it was situated within a broader narrative of the Imperial Army’s brutality throughout Asia during that period.

On the other hand, Ramseyer and Morgan both go to great lengths documenting the remarkable credulity that prominent western academics demonstrated here. One might expect some baseline level of rigor to be the norm among graduate and doctorate level research, but this baseline, at least where this narrative was concerned, turned out to be far below even what would be acceptable for an undergraduate standard:

Japanese scholars and intellectuals have been flummoxed by the way that Western scholars consistently refuse to read and take seriously the enormous amount of documentary evidence and careful historical scholarship on the comfort station regime. This material is in Japanese. Rather than read and discuss it, Western scholars simply trumpet the Yoshida hoax and blithely move on.⁶

The authors further note Morgan’s previous advisor’s public comments on the very same topic, that “the intellectual production of Japan knowledge remains overwhelmingly anglophone (German and Japanese scholars need to publish in English to get international visibility) and is still centered in the US.”⁷ This is a sentiment that should come across as patently absurd considering the size and scope of Japan’s own academic institutions, to say nothing of the fact that, by and large, Japanese scholars of Japanese history have about as much need for international visibility as American scholars of American history have for Japanese visibility.

If one expects to hold informed, public opinions on a particular people’s history and culture, one ought at least have some familiarity with the language their history was written in. This seems like common sense, but for Western liberal arts academicians, such an expression would constitute an affront to their credentials. One almost feels some amount of second-hand shame from their behavior, not simply because it comes across as unbecoming of the professional class, but because of the disregard they showed for their grasp over the subject at hand. As the book documents with the help of the Internet Archive, some of these professionals acted less like research-minded academics and instead like gossip-hungry midwits.

This behavior is not new or unique to the academy. One need only remember the early 2010s, when the term ‘Social Justice Warrior’ still denoted this kind of personality: one all too eager to dog-pile, signal his own intelligence, and use some prevailing liberal narrative as a bludgeon against (usually) unsuspecting purveyors of heterodox ideas. By the time Ramseyer faced his canceling, this term was already ancient, as far as lingo went. But it remains nonetheless relevant: their playbook never changed; none of them learned anything from the latter half of the 2010s. If anything, true to form, they doubled down on their obstinance wherever they could. To this day, Western academics and popular consciousness, insofar as a comfort women narrative exists in Western popular consciousness, continues to reference the Yoshida hoax and everything that spawned from it to be truthful. And worse, just as Ramseyer criticized, those most vocal seem to remain those with the smallest grasp on the subject.

The picture of Western historians in academia that the authors paint, then, is one in which certain academics reveal themselves more than willing to take complicated, politically charged historical events of other countries and deform them, according to the playbook of geopolitical enemies, to fit their own ideological narrative. And it’s an embarrassing picture because the degree of scholarship they display in doing so is so poor that it takes only a cursory glance to see the holes. That these academics are the same ones who deploy terms like ‘colonization,’ ‘imperialism,’ or ‘cultural appropriation’ as slurs against their ideological rivals is an irony that should not go unnoticed.

Conclusion

Denialists, they also call us. When we first heard the insult, it left us momentarily baffled: deny what? The Holocaust, they seemed to reply—usually implicitly, sometimes explicitly. The explanation puzzled us even more: what does the history of the comfort women have to do with the Holocaust?⁸

What does the history of the comfort women have to do with the Holocaust? Let the reader decide. In terms of facts, very little. The Holocaust happened in Europe, by Germans, against (for the most part) Jews and the handicapped. The comfort women had to do with Korean women, Japanese women, Chinese and Southeast Asian women, and the soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army on the other side of the planet. It’s very hard to find either Germans or Jews on that side of the world, unless one look specifically at Nanjing, where Germans apparently made refuge for civilians during its sack, or Kaifeng, where the oldest community of Chinese Jews resided at that point. Neither of these facts have anything to do with comfort women, however.

As the authors note, neither Germans, nor Jews, nor Europe have any thing to do with the comfort women. But the cry that denies the Yoshida narrative is, to a Western scholar’s ears, the same as the cry that denies Anne Frank’s. These are two totally unlike things except that they are both narratives overshadowed by their connotations to nationalist ideologies which modern liberal democracy has slurred into boogeymen. More ideologically attuned liberal arts scholars have come to associate any serious scholarship about the actions of these regimes to be adjacent to sympathy if not outright agreement with them; this is the trap that Ramseyer and Morgan inadvertently stumbled into.

Their book is not just about how a hoax memoir led to fabrications and lies about the Japanese government during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It isn’t just about how this deception was leveraged for political purposes by North Korean agents in order to drive a wedge between their southern co-ethnics and that state’s security guarantors. Nor is it just about how Western liberal arts academics fell for the deception because it so neatly fit the narrative well-nourished for it by feminism and other modern leftist discourse. It’s about all of these things, of course, but what’s more striking is how shoddy the conspiracy was, how flimsy the hoax attempt was, how obvious the lies were, how easily the experts were fooled, and how shameless their actions were in the process.

To this day, the narrative that claims comfort women were kidnapped from remote villages and forced into sex slavery on the orders of Japanese high command remains entrenched in most English corners of the internet. Wikipedia’s page for comfort women retains this lie and, perhaps predictably, cites as evidence for it Yoshida’s fake memoir and the so-called scholarship that used it as a primary source. Those in the West familiar with the term ‘comfort women’ almost certainly associate it with this narrative, unaware of how flimsy it is upon any informed analysis.

The Comfort Women Hoax spends approximately half of its length detailing the hoax itself and its impact on Asian politics and the other half on the academic push back to the authors’ interest in this narrative that culminated in their canceling. They provide appendices in the back which back up the claims they make about the comfort women narrative, and a thorough sixteen page bibliography of sources and further reading. This is clearly intended to be something of a popular release for general audiences, or at least those aware of the comfort women narrative at large and curious about the story behind it.

1116.

293.

389.

4209.

5216.

6224.

7Ibid.

8256.

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