Ikuhiko Hata is a leading historian on the subject of the comfort women who served alongside the Japanese Army in the 1930s and 1940s and is credited with being the first to expose as fraudulent the testimony of Seiji Yoshida, who claimed to have kidnapped Korean women for the Japanese military. Hata, who argues that the comfort women were not sex slaves but largely willing prostitutes with a minority of them being sold by their parents and more crucially, no direct involvement by Japanese military except a few incidents in South East Asia, summed up his views on the issue with,