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Here is my quick take on Mark Ramseyer's new article in the International Review of Law and Economics, ostensibly on sex contracts in wartime Japan. "Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War." International Review of Law and Economics 65, March 2021, 105971
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.irle.2020.105971
I posted the following comments after the news item on the History News Network.
The main flaw with Ramseyer’s essay is that he steps beyond the narrow analysis of contractual theory to gratuitously assert no coercion was involved in wartime “recruitment” into sex services. He makes the surprising, unexamined assumption that a handful of contracts from the prostitution industry in Japan and Korea can be taken as the norm for wartime recruitment to the comfort station system.
The reader gets a hint at this problem at the beginning of the essay when Ramseyer imagines “If [recruiters or brothel owners] promised a fixed monthly wage, they gave each woman an incentive to be sufficiently unpleasant that no one asked for her at the front desk.” He seems to imagine a bordello rather than a field camp, or even the possibility that soldiers could ask for one woman rather than another when accounts exist of each woman’s docket including a dozen or more men in one work period.
One feels compelled to repeat this. Ramseyer does not distinguish adequately between sex industry practices carrying over from peacetime, and far more extensive mobilization of women for sex services in a wartime comfort station system. Doubtless there is some overlap between the two, but he simply ignores the larger narrative of extra-legal maneuvering. He cites government regulations from wartime Japan--the legal requirement that women had to be prostitutes to begin with before being sent into prostitution abroad—to suggest the comfort station system did not use any women unaware of what they were getting into. And as for Korea he indicates that unscrupulous Korean recruiters had been operating in the sex industry for decades before the comfort system emerged, giving an example from 1918 to assert that it was NOT the Korean or Japanese governments forcing women into prostitution, nor the Japanese Army working with such recruiters. Assuming prostitution and comfort system recruitment were one and the same seems myopic at best.
Ramseyer also seems woefully unaware there was variation within that comfort station system. A small number of “comfort station” brothels established in Shanghai from 1932 do not reflect the larger system created for mobilized armies after 1937, nor the field comfort stations created using local women in ad-hoc fashion on the front later on. Any Japanologist ought to know this.
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Comments
Peter Matanle
Colin Jones's JT article is the most sensible I've read on this. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/.../never-mind-facts-logic.../
Never mind the facts — logic alone demolishes 'comfort women' deniers' case
JAPANTIMES.CO.JP
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https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2015/01/07/issues/never-mind-facts-logic-alone-demolishes-comfort-women-deniers-case/?fbclid=IwAR2TjOBm6w-hJxb6B1X6MQbQ227rCckH8rBHLsljXRGAjrKcTG2-4yNyaMQ
· Reply · 4 h
Aaron Moore
Thanks, this is a solid take. Hopefully we can stop talking about this guy soon.
· Reply · 3 h
Peter Matanle
Sadly I doubt it. He'll keep churning out nonsense as long as Harvard and Mitsubishi continue to pay him.
· Reply · 2 h
Aaron Moore
Peter Matanle he's like our own little Donald Trump, isn't he?
· Reply · 1 h
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Kaitlin Forgash
I know of a number of academics who have written to the publisher to demand a retraction, and are encouraging others to do the same.
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