The women were taken by force or entrapped by deception in many countries in and beyond Asia, but a large number came from Korea, which, at the time, was a colony of Japan.
Estimates of the number of victims have ranged widely, from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. I was ruminating on how legal decisions relating to Second World War crimes against humanity might help resolve or aggravate historical traumas that seem impossible to leave in the pastβin part, because they have been mired in waves of conflict and denial about the truth of what happened.
On January 31st, I began to receive messages from students and alumni of Harvard Law School, where I am a professor, about a longtime colleague of mine, J.
Mark Ramseyer, a corporate-law specialist in Japanese legal studies. I knew him slightly, as an unassuming man in his late sixties who had ridden bikes with my husband and once advised us on what Japanese knives to buy.
A child and grandchild of American Mennonite missionaries in Asia, he grew up in Japan. I knew that his scholarly contributions had included debunking conventional wisdom about the postwar Japanese economy.
