Controversy over 'comfort women'

By Mark Peterson

The Korean press has been buzzing with reports of a Harvard Law School professor's academic journal article on Korean "comfort women" saying there were hired prostitutes. I've been dragged into the fray by many friends and some people I don't know who have asked that I respond since I, after all, have a PhD from Harvard. I've taken the bait and have prepared responses and criticisms for a Korean ministry article, a Korean TV station, I've made a video for my YouTube station, and I think more requests are coming.

I don't like the subject. I find it so distasteful and sad that I do not like dealing with it in a specific way ― I only have a general understanding of the topic. But I've read the Harvard Law professor's article and as a professor of history, I can indeed critique it. I find it woefully inadequate, misleading, and not worthy of publication. In other words, the reviewers at the journal, peer reviewers?, should have flagged it as sophomoric and not worthy of publication.

Here's where the Harvard thing comes in? The reviewers may have given a free pass to the professor because he is a Harvard professor? Surely, a man of solid reputation would not submit an article that wasn't researched well! But therein lies another problem ― the research looks like good law school research. On the surface.

Here is where the historian's eye comes in. As a historian, I see the article as poorly researched and misleading. As a piece of law school "research" I can see where it might be acceptable ― in law school academic publishing. I suppose that law school prepares a lawyer to take any case, any side, without consideration of one's own position on an issue.

The "guilty" deserve a fair trial, and an "advocate" who will argue the case for them. Here, the "guilty" is the Japanese government, and the professor seems to be taking an advocacy position ― it doesn't matter what the truth is, the lawyer is putting forward the best case for the defendant.

As such, the journal article is very interesting, if even in a sordid way. It describes the legal institution of prostitution in Japan in the early, mid twentieth century. By extension, since Japanese institutions were being planted in Korea, the laws and legality of prostitution were basically the same in Korea as in Japan. The article goes into great detail outlining the contractual, financial, and legal aspects of prostitution in Japan and in Korea, and argues that the same arrangements were in place for overseas deployments of battlefront "comfort stations."

There are so many flaws in the logic of the piece that it's hard to list them all. The author bedazzled the journal reviewers with a thorough outlining of the laws governing prostitution in Korea and Japan. But to assert that such nicey, nicey legal protections were available to the women in Manchuria, and China, and Burma is preposterous. A woman who would have a complaint would go to whom for protection? To scream, "But I've got a contract!", is silly on the surface of it in a battlefront situation. No policemen to go to. No local government authority to go to. No lawyer to hire. Absurd.

And the idea that mostly underprivileged, uneducated, illiterate women would even know what the contract said is ludicrous. But here is a Harvard Law professor outlining the legal protections provided to legal prostitutes, writing in 2021 America, looking at the law as if it were a real thing for a mid-twentieth century, overseas, wartime situation.

Yes the article is a good piece of legal scholarship if the principles all lived in a test tube.

There is no pretense of presenting the historical situation. The "comfort stations" of wartime Japan can only be understood if one knows of the Massacre of Nanjing (as it's called in Korean ― in English it's the "Rape of Nanjing") where Japanese soldiers defeated the Chinese defending Nanjing at great cost, whereupon the Japanese soldiers took out their vengeance on the city with wanton killing of men, women and children and the raping of women.

Accused of war crimes by the world at large, the Japanese thought it best to channel the sexual energy of their soldiers into "legal" prostitution ― and thus the "comfort stations" became the substituting of one war crime for another. They substituted one war crime for another war crime.

The greater problem with the Harvard Law School article, however, is the echoing of its sentiment by Japanese officials. Prime ministers, consul generals (Atlanta), and others have said, "Well, they were prostitutes weren't they?" As if that made it okay?

NO!, most were not prostitutes. But we know from witnesses that most were kidnapped (like sex trafficking today), swindled, tricked, ― promised good jobs and dumped into the sex trafficking network of the Japanese battlefront.

Harvard's Korean student organizations and the East Asian faculty are writing a counter critique of the piece from an academic perspective in hopes that that journal will reconsider the worth of publishing the piece in hardcopy ― it has only been on line so far. Maybe there will be some small measure of justice.

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.