During World War II, the Japanese military extended Japan's civilian licensing regime for domestic brothels to those next to its overseas bases. It did so for a simple reason: to impose the strenuous health standards necessary to control the venereal disease that had debilitated its troops in earlier wars. In turn, these brothels (dubbed "comfort stations") recruited prostitutes through variations on the standard indenture contracts used by licensed brothels in both Korea and Japan.

The party line in Western academia, though, is that these "comfort women" were dragooned into sex slavery at bayonet point by Japanese infantry. But, as the authors of this book show, that narrative originated as a hoax perpetrated by a Japanese communist writer in the 1980s. It was then spread by a South Korean organization with close ties to the Communist North.

Ramseyer and Morgan discuss how these women really came to be in Japanese military comfort stations. Some took the jobs because they were tricked by fraudulent recruiters. Some were under pressure from abusive parents. But the rest of the women seem to have been driven by the same motivation as most prostitutes throughout history: want of money. Indeed, the notion that these comfort women became prostitutes by any other means has no basis in documentary history.

Ramseyer and Morgan's findings caused a firestorm in Japanese Studies academia. For explaining that the women became prostitutes of their own volition, both authors of this book found themselves "cancelled."

In this book, the authors detail both the history of the comfort women and their own persecution by academic peers. Only in the West-and only through brutal stratagems of censorship and ostracism-has the myth of bayonet-point conscription survived.

About the Author

J. MARK RAMSEYER spent most of his childhood in provincial towns and cities in southern Japan, attending Japanese schools for K-6. He returned to the US for college. Before attending law school, he studied Japanese history in graduate school. Ramseyer graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1982. He clerked for the Hon. Stephen Breyer (then on the First Circuit), worked for two years at Sidley & Austin (in corporate tax), and studied as a Fulbright student at the University of Tokyo. After teaching at UCLA and the University of Chicago, he moved to Harvard in 1998. He writes and lectures in both English and Japanese, and has also taught or co-taught courses at several Japanese universities (in Japanese).

Reviews

"The cancel culture mob can come after anyone, for saying something that is actually politically incorrect, or simply twisted into seeming so. Truth is irrelevant. It takes courage to publish a controversial article in the face of that threat. Jason Morgan wrote in 2015 and Mark Ramseyer in 2020, and both had the courage not to stand down when attacked. Read their book and decide on the truth for yourself."

-Bernie Black, Nicholas J. Chabraja Professor, Northwestern University

"I grew up in the USSR, the home of the original cancel system; for a while, it was also the home of serious efforts to understand this phenomenon. Ramseyer and Morgan give us a new entry to that sad database of systemic madness. The book is a captivating, fast-moving, occasionally terrifying read, an account of colossal personal and institutional failures: internet mobs, spiteful academics, gutless administrators, pathological publishing process, all wrapped in fascinating details about the life in the elite academy."

-Kate Litvak, Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law

"The Comfort Women Hoax is a riveting account of Korea's 'comfort women,' but also of hideous academic corruption in both Korea and the West. It illustrates how closed-minded professors with political agendas will ostracize, deplatform, and try to silence any honest scholar who, by debunking myths, undermines their favored narratives. Mark Ramseyer and Jason Morgan shed new light on the pernicious forces that are discouraging dispassionate and objective inquiry on politicized topics."

-Timur Kuran, Professor of Economics and Political Science; Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies, Duke University

Book Information
ISBN 9781641773454
Author J. Mark Ramseyer
Format Hardback
Page Count 320
Imprint Encounter Books,USA
Publisher Encounter Books,USA