Both of the authors found themselves savagely "canceled" by their peers in Japanese studies programs in the U.S. for refusing to follow the Woke line on the World War II "comfort women."  Contrary to the party line in American humanities departments, the women were not slaves.  They were prostitutes.  And the notion that they were anything but prostitutes owes itself to a hoax perpetrated by a Japanese communist author in the 1980s.  Any serious Japanese intellectual (of any political perspective) understands this, and many intellectuals in South Korea understand it as well.  It is a mark of the intellectual bankruptcy of the hyper-politicized humanities departments that they continue to cling to this 1980s-vintage hoax.       Through its "comfort women" framework, the Japanese military extended its licensing regime for domestic brothels to the brothels next to its overseas bases.  Through that regime, it imposed the strenuous health standards it needed to control the venereal disease that had debilitated its troops in earlier wars.  These "comfort stations" recruited their prostitutes through variations on the standard indenture contracts that the licensed brothels had used in both Korea and Japan.  Some women took the jobs because they were tricked by fraudulent recruiters.  Some took them under pressure from abusive parents.  But the rest seem to have taken the jobs for the money.

Employing a rational-choice approach, Professor Ramseyer studies the impact of Japanese law on economic growth in Japan. Toward that end, the author investigates the way law governed various markets, and the way that people negotiated contracts within those markets. Findings reveal that the legal system generally promoted mutually advantageous deals, and that people generally negotiated in ways that shrewdly promoted their private best interests. Whether in the markets for indentured servants, prostitutes, or marriage partners, this study reports little evidence of either age- or gender-related exploitation.

This statutory supplement includes statutes and rules relevant to all business entities. It is suitable for use with all textbooks and casebooks for such courses. It is includes all updates to the statutes and rules.

Several years have passed since the 'store wars' over barriers to foreign products at Japanese distribution firms. Yet among English-speaking readers, how these firms operate remains a puzzle. In this book, the best Japanese scholars in their fields attempt to unravel that puzzle. Avoiding culture-based explanations, they employ a systematic and rigorous economic logic---yet, since they also avoid mathematical notation, the argument remains accessible to generalist readers.

Economic arrangements, Ramseyer writes, are structured and implemented with the intent and hope that they will be carried out with 'care, intelligence, discretion, and effort.' Yet entrepreneurs work with partial information about the products, and people, they are dealing with. Contracting in Japan illustrates this by examining five sets of negotiations and unusual contractual arrangements among non-specialist businessmen, and women, in Japan. In it, Ramseyer explores how sake brewers were able to obtain and market the necessary, but difficult-to-grow, sake rice that captured the local terroir; how Buddhist temples tried to compensate for rapidly falling donations by negotiating unusual funerary contracts; and how pre-war local elites used leasing instead of loans to fund local agriculture. Ramseyer examines these entrepreneurs, discovering how they structured contracts, made credible commitments, obtained valuable information, and protected themselves from adverse consequences to create, maintain, strengthen, and leverage the social networks in which they operated.

Economic arrangements, Ramseyer writes, are structured and implemented with the intent and hope that they will be carried out with 'care, intelligence, discretion, and effort.' Yet entrepreneurs work with partial information about the products, and people, they are dealing with. Contracting in Japan illustrates this by examining five sets of negotiations and unusual contractual arrangements among non-specialist businessmen, and women, in Japan. In it, Ramseyer explores how sake brewers were able to obtain and market the necessary, but difficult-to-grow, sake rice that captured the local terroir; how Buddhist temples tried to compensate for rapidly falling donations by negotiating unusual funerary contracts; and how pre-war local elites used leasing instead of loans to fund local agriculture. Ramseyer examines these entrepreneurs, discovering how they structured contracts, made credible commitments, obtained valuable information, and protected themselves from adverse consequences to create, maintain, strengthen, and leverage the social networks in which they operated.

Using a straightforward rational-choice approach, Professor Ramseyer explores the impact that law had on various markets in Japanese history and the effect that those markets had on economic growth. In doing so, he applies an economic logic to markets in a different world in a different historical period with a different political regime and a different legal system. He looks hardest at those markets that have most often struck traditional observers as "exploitative" (e.g., the markets for indentured servants and for sexual services). Within those markets, he focuses on the way participants handled informational asymmetries in the contracting process. Ramseyer finds that Japanese courts generally defined important property rights clearly, and that Japanese markets generally protected an individual's control over his or her own labor. As a result, that the Japanese economy grew at relatively efficient levels follows directly from standard economic theory. He also concludes that the legal system usually promoted mutually advantageous deals, and that market participants (whether poor or rich, female or male) generally mitigated informational asymmetries shrewdly by contract. He finds no systematic evidence of either sex- or age-based exploitation.

In the latter-half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, Japan underwent two major shifts in political control. In the 1910s, the power of the oligarchy was eclipsed by that of a larger group of professional politicians; in the 1930s, the focus of power shifted again, this time to a set of independent military leaders. In this book, Ramseyer and Rosenbluth examine a key question of modern Japanese politics: why the Meiji oligarchs were unable to design institutions capable of protecting their power. The authors question why the oligarchs chose the political institutions they did, and what the consequences of those choices were for Japan's political competition, economic development, and diplomatic relations. Indeed, they argue, it was the oligarchs' very inability to agree among themselves on how to rule that prompted them to cut the military loose from civilian control - a decision that was to have disastrous consequences not only for Japan but for the rest of the world. 1997 Winner of the American Political Science Association Gregory Luebbert Prize for the Best Book in Comparative Politics.

In the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, Japan underwent two major shifts in political control. In the 1910s, the power of the oligarchy was eclipsed by that of a larger group of professional politicians. In the 1930s, the locus of power shifted again, this time to a set of independent military leaders. In The Politics of Oligarchy, J. Mark Ramseyer and Frances M. Rosenbluth examine a key question of modern Japanese politics: Why were the Meiji oligarchs unable to design institutions capable of protecting their power? Using an analytical framework for oligarchic governments not specific to Japan, the authors ask why the oligarchs chose the political institutions they did, and what consequences those choices engendered for Japan's political competition, economic development, and diplomatic relations. Ramseyer and Rosenbluth argue that understanding these shifts in power may clarify the general dynamics of oligarchic government, as well as theoretical aspects of the relationship between institutional structure and regime change.

When discussing Japanese politics or the Japanese legal system, many scholars point to the peculiarities of the country's culture - its need for consensus, its rejection of individualism, its Confucian fascination with loyalty. Other scholars simply invent new theories ad hoc to explain what they see. But is Japan really so different that general social scientific theories don't apply? Ramseyer and Rosenbluth don't think so, and in this book they show how rational-choice theory can be applied to Japanese politics, with telling results.