Harvard Law School professor of Japanese Legal Studies J. Mark Ramseyer has faced an outpouring of public criticism from government officials worldwide against his upcoming paper, which claims that sex slaves, known as âcomfort women,â under the Imperial Japanese military were voluntary employed. Ramseyerâs paper stoked international controversy by disputing the historical consensus that âcomfort womenâ â a euphemism commonly used to refer to women and girls used as sex slaves by the Imperial Japanese military before and during World War II â were compelled into sex work against their will. Unlike many scholastic disputes, which do not stretch far outside academia, Ramseyerâs article has drawn strong responses from high-ranking government officials of several countries, including the United States, China, South Korea, Japan, and even North Korea.