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Yoshiaki Yoshimi, professor emeritus at Chuo University, speaks during an online seminar Sunday. (Screenshot from the seminar)

A recent academic paper by Harvard Law School professor J. Mark Ramseyer characterizing comfort women as prostitutes is “too riddled with problems to be acknowledged as an academic paper,” according to a Chuo University emeritus professor who is considered Japan’s foremost authority on the wartime military sexual slavery issue.

Professor Yoshiaki Yoshimi offered a point-by-point rebuttal of Ramseyer’s paper Sunday while taking part in an online seminar co-organized by Fight for Justice — a Japanese civic group that operates an academic site on the military sexual slavery issue — and several academic groups including the Japanese Society for Historical Studies, the Historical Science Society of Japan, the Association of Historical Science, and the History Educationalist Conference of Japan.

“Dr. Ramseyer’s paper ignores the important fact that the Japanese military and government created and maintained the comfort women system as an institution of sexual slavery,” Yoshimi said.

According to Yoshimi, “comfort station” operators were subordinate to the military and were unable to even decide the rates charged at their establishments.

He also pointed to copious evidence and research showing that the comfort women themselves could not be parties to the contracts, which meant that even if contracts did exist, the system amounted to human trafficking.

Despite this previous research, Ramseyer claimed in his paper that operators and comfort women entered into contractual relationships, with each party asserting their respective interests.

“In his paper, Ramseyer does not present a single piece of evidence to support his claim [that the comfort women were voluntary sex workers], and there are some things that he appears to have simply made up,” Yoshimi said.

“The biggest flaw is that it disregards the enormous human rights violations suffered by the comfort women as victims of a sexual slavery system,” he added.

In 1992, Yoshimi discovered the first documentation showing the Japanese military and government’s close involvement in creating the comfort women system. This would go on to influence a 1993 statement by then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, in which the Japanese government acknowledged the coercive nature of the women’s mobilization.

Akane Onozawa, a Rikkyo University professor who has studied Japan’s modern factory system and the Japanese military’s comfort women system, also blasted Ramseyer’s work as “failing to meet the requirements of an academic paper.”

“Most of the women enlisted as ‘comfort women’ in colonies and regions occupied by the Japanese military were recruited through means such as violence, fraud and human trafficking by the Japanese military itself or by operators acting on orders from the Japanese military,” she said.

Other seminar attendees who raised issues with Ramseyer’s work included National University of Singapore professor Sayaka Chatani, Osaka Sangyo University professor Takeshi Fujinaga and University of Toronto professor Lisa Yoneyama.

By Kim So-youn, staff reporter

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