Comfort Women Revisited: Law, Politics, and Academic Freedom

At a recent seminar hosted by the Heterodox Academy East Asia, the comfort women issue took center stage as scholars from across disciplines engaged in a candid debate.

Founded in 2015, Heterodox Academy is an American non-profit organization dedicated to promoting academic freedom and greater political diversity in higher education.

Its East Asia Chapter, of which I'm a founding member, was created in late 2021. Since its inception, we have tackled some of the region's most polarizing and sensitive issues.

Judicializing the Past

Legal historian Marie Kim opened the discussion by examining the South Korean judiciary's growing role in adjudicating historical grievances. She cited the 2021 ruling in which a South Korean court awarded damages to 12 former comfort women who had sued the Japanese government, despite Tokyo's invocation of state immunity.

A comparable ruling followed in 2023, when the Seoul High Court overturned a lower court's dismissal of a similar case. The High Court stated that state immunity did not apply, as the comfort women system constituted "an egregious human rights violation."

Kim argued that rulings by domestic courts, which are often not entirely free from political influence, tend to complicate disputes between sovereign states.

"Courts are not well-equipped to find out what really happened many, many years ago," she said. "Judicialization of the past is often dangerous because courts tend to favor moralization of history in the name of justice."

Inconsistent Reasoning

Further complicating matters, Kim noted, is the inconsistency in how South Korean courts have approached colonial-era cases.

In comfort women rulings, for instance, South Korean courts have asserted that the Japanese military violated both international law and penal codes enforced on the Korean Peninsula at the time.

Yet in a separate wartime labor dispute, the Supreme Court in 2018 took a markedly different approach. It ruled that Japan's entire colonial legal framework was unlawful on the grounds that the 1910 annexation of Korea was itself "invalid."

Attorneys for South Korean plaintiffs responding to reporters' interviews before the first meeting of the public-private council to resolve the wartime labor issue on July 4, 2022, in front of the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs (©Tatsuya Tokiyoshi)

Kim, who is also a jurist, suggested that both positions cannot be held simultaneously. Either colonial-era laws were valid and enforceable, or they were invalid and void.

"Some scholars argue that colonial law had no force because the people of Korea lived under foreign occupation. This sort of argument is rather kind of embarrassing," Kim said.

"It's like saying that people without national sovereignty, like Korea at that time, are not capable of entering into any contractual relationship."

Korean Council's Contested Legacy

Professor Chizuko Allen of the University of Hawaii offered a broader international context. She pointed out that the Korean Council, South Korea's largest comfort women advocacy group, was not formed in response to victim testimony, but rather emerged as part of a wider international feminist movement.

Notably, the first comfort woman victim in South Korea stepped forward in August 1991, nine months after the organization was established.

Before the Council's formation in November 1990, Allen said, South Korean intellectuals worked closely with North Korea and Japan's Socialist Party, organizing joint women's conferences in Seoul, Pyongyang, and Tokyo.

Dr Tetsuo Arima comfort women — *Former Korean Council head Yoon Mee Hyang (center) with comfort women Lee Yong Soo (right) and Moon Phil Gi. Taken in 2002 at Pyongyang's Juche Tower in North Korea. (© Yoon Mee Hyang/ Facebook post)*

Around that time, North Korea was engaged in diplomatic normalization talks with Japan, starting in January 1991. But after failing to secure economic assistance, Pyongyang publicly alleged that hundreds of thousands of Korean women had been forced into sexual slavery under the guise of the Women's Volunteer Corps during Japanese colonial rule, Allen said.

In many ways, the conflation of the Women's Volunteer Corps with the comfort women system reflects a broader lack of historical understanding. The Japanese government established the Corps in 1944 to conscript unmarried women into industrial labor roles amid acute wartime labor shortages.

Yet this misunderstanding was not limited to Pyongyang. The Korean Council, too, frequently blurred the distinction, even incorporating the term Volunteer Corps into its original name. In 2018, the organization abruptly rebranded itself to Justice for the Comfort Women.

China's Strategic Co-opt

North Korea, of course, is not the only nation exploiting the comfort women issue as a diplomatic tool against Japan. China is also increasingly doing so.

Since Xi Jinping's rise to power in 2014, Allen explained, China has moved from indifference to proactive engagement in the comfort women issue. Cities like Shanghai and Nanjing opened museums dedicated to claimed victims, while Beijing actively pushed to include their testimonies in UNESCO's World Heritage registry. In 2024, families of 18 former Chinese comfort women filed a lawsuit seeking compensation from Japan.

"[China would do] anything to isolate Japan internationally….and to weaken the US-Japan-South Korea security partnership," Allen said.

Beyond geopolitics, the professor also noted a mental dimension. "It's kind of like psychological warfare," Allen said. "They want to attack Japanese self-esteem, especially among the young people, so that they will lower their guard."

Reexamining the Origins

Wrapping up the seminar, Harvard Law professor J Mark Ramseyer provided a critical perspective on the origins of the comfort women narrative.

"This [Comfort women issue] isn't something where the answer is sort of a little of this and a little bit of that," he said. "This whole thing is a fraud."

According to Ramseyer, the modern controversy originated with Seiji Yoshida, a former Imperial Japanese soldier who published fabricated memoirs in the 1980s claiming he had been involved in "hunting down" Korean women for sexual slavery. Yoshida later admitted that his account was falsified.

"If you go back and look at Korean and Japanese newspapers from 1945 to 1983, there's virtually nothing about comfort women," Ramseyer argued.

The turning point, he said, was the dissemination of Yoshida's memoir in Japan in 1983 and its Korean translation in 1989. Alongside this, The Asahi Shimbun amplified the claims through its nationwide readership.

The Cost of Dissent

Ramseyer also addressed his academic work that ignited controversy. In 2021, he published a brief paper arguing that the comfort women system operated under contractual terms, with women receiving upfront payments and the possibility of shortened service periods based on performance incentives.

The backlash was immediate and intense. Faculty and students at Harvard and beyond launched petitions calling for the journal to retract his paper and demanding an apology.

"The notion that in 2021, people would attack me for talking about the contract structure just had me completely blown away," Ramseyer said.

*Professor J Mark Ramseyer of Harvard University gives a keynote speech at a trilateral symposium on the comfort women issue in Nagatacho, Tokyo, on July 10. (©Sankei by Takao Harakawa)*

When asked by Joseph Yi, the moderator, whether he was politicizing his scholarship by engaging with right-leaning groups and political parties in Japan, Ramseyer responded: "If Hillary Clinton wanted to talk to me, I'd be happy to talk to her too. I'm not picky."

"I've never heard of any colleague of mine being criticized for speaking to a left-wing group," he added.

While our chapter has extended invitations to academics from the other side of the aisle, very few have been willing to participate in the seminar and openly challenge opposing views.