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This article discusses the controversy surrounding J. Mark Ramseyer's paper on "Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War," which challenges the existence of "comfort women" in imperial Japan. Despite criticism from scholars and historians, the paper has not been retracted but has received an expression of concern. Ramseyer's work has been criticized for lacking scientific rigor and distorting evidence, with scholars pointing out incorrect citations and distortions. Ramseyer and his allies have used right-wing media outlets to promote his work and attack his critics. The authors argue for the retraction of the paper to prevent its continued use as legitimate scholarship and stress the importance of combating the misuse of evidence in academia. [Extracted from the article]

In "Freedom, Slavery, and Homo Economicus," Amy Dru Stanley explores two provocative claims advanced by Melvin Patrick Ely in Israel on the Appomattox--first, that the very existence of slavery allowed for the freedoms asserted by black persons who were not chattel and, second, that the worldview of Israel Hill's free blacks had much in common with that of other propertied persons in antebellum America. Focusing on the latter point, Stanley argues that Ely's work disrupts assumptions about the stark dualities of the Old South and the Yankee North. Accordingly, she suggests that questions raised regarding Northern white freeholders might fruitfully apply to Southern black freeholders: were the Israelites acquisitive, individualistic economic actors? At stake, Stanley writes, is ultimately the nature of sovereignty--the lived relations of personal dominion in Israel Hill. Invoking a recent debate between Douglas Egerton and Walter Johnson about the libratory power of money in the slave South, Stanley sketches the clashing worldviews that might have existed on Israel Hill--a possessive subjectivity animated by acquisitive individualism or a collective subjectivity rooted in racial kinship. Stanley claims that regardless of whether Israelites conceived of themselves as the "we" of the racial subject, the "I" of the bourgeois subject, or some fusion of the two, their market pursuits disrupted the Southern system of racial sovereignty and confused the relationship between bondage and freedom, rendering still more provocative Ely's argument that slavery itself enabled the freedom of black people not owned as chattel property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the process of our investigation, we also found and read Ramseyer's English language article about the Comfort Women issue in I JAPANForward i , "Recovering the Truth about Comfort Women", which had been published on January 12th, two weeks before the I Sankei Shimbun i piece.[2] In his I JAPANForward i piece, Ramseyer asserted that "claims about enslaved Korean comfort women are historically untrue" and "pure fiction." Mischaracterization of Japanese Home Ministry Documents In section 3.3, "Contract Prices", Ramseyer references a collection of documents from the Japanese Home Ministry, which he cites as "Naimusho 1938."[30] Ramseyer does not provide exact page numbers or more specific references. One of the sources Ramseyer cites, Kim and Kim, I Shokuminchi yukaku: Nihon no guntai to Chosen hanto i [Colonial red-light districts: The Japanese military and the Korean peninsula], provides indirect information about payment in the prewar Korean licensed system through newspaper and magazine reports and oral testimony. Mischaracterization of testimony of Mun Ok-ju In section 3.5 of the article, "Prostitute savings", Ramseyer writes: "Of all the Korean comfort women who left accounts, Mun Ok-ju seems to have done well most flamboyantly. Use of Secondary Sources Selective citations to Kim and Kim, Shokuminchi yukaku: Nihon no guntai to Chosen hanto Ramseyer pulls facts from this source regarding the relative numbers of Japanese and Korean women in licensed brothels in Korea, their ages, their compensation, and how much brothel keepers charged for their services (4). [Extracted from the article]