Wooyoun Lee Ramseyer’s Paper: Criticisms of It, and Arguments in Its Favor

In the paper, Ramseyer argued: 1) That the relationship between the owner of a “comfort station” and a “comfort woman” was a contractual relationship, no different from the relationship between a brothel owner and a prostitute before World War II, and 2) That the treatment of comfort women in wartime was better than the treatment generally accorded to prostitutes before the war. [...] The money that women earned from their customers, namely the gyokudai (sales), was split between the owner and the women according to a certain ratio, and the women used the gyokuwari (the portion of the money that belonged to the women) to pay back part of the advance they had received. [...] The same was true of the prostitutes who worked in Japanese brothels before the Asia-Pacific War and of the military comfort women during the conflict. [...] The United Nations Human Rights Commission adopted the so-called Coomaraswamy Report in 1996.14 However, contrary to the belief of the critics, the only “evidence” that has survived is the testimony of comfort women. [...] The questions in the records: Do Koreans generally know about the recruitment of Korean girls by the Japanese Army to serve as prostitutes? What is the attitude of the average Korean toward this program? Does the PoW [prisoner of war] know of any disturbance or friction which has grown out of this program? The answers were as follows: All Korean prostitutes that the PoWs have seen in the Pacific W.