A Harvard University professor has ignited an international uproar and faces mounting scrutiny for saying that Korean women who were kept as sex slaves in Japan during World War II had actually chosen to work as prostitutes.
In an academic paper, J. Mark Ramseyer rejected a wide body of research finding that Japan’s so-called “comfort women” were forced to work at military brothels. Ramseyer instead argued that the women willingly entered into contracts as sex workers.
His paper has intensified a political dispute between Japan, whose leaders deny that the women were coerced, and South Korea, which has long pressed Japan to provide apologies and compensation to women who have shared accounts of rape and abuse.
Photo: AP
Decades of research has explored the abuses inflicted on comfort women from Korea and other nations previously occupied by Japan.
In the 1990s, women began sharing accounts detailing how they were taken to comfort stations and forced to provide sexual services for the Japanese military.
Hundreds of academics have signed letters condemning Ramseyer’s article, which united Pyongyang and Seoul in sparking outrage.
North Korea’s state-run DPRK Today on Tuesday last week published an article calling Ramseyer a “repulsive money grubber” and a “pseudo academic.”
Ramseyer, a professor of Japanese legal studies at Harvard Law School, declined to comment.
Ramseyer’s article, titled “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War,” was published online in December last year and was scheduled to appear in this month’s issue of the International Review of Law and Economics.
However, the issue has been suspended and the journal issued an “expression of concern,” saying the article is under investigation.
Most alarming to historians is what they say is a lack of evidence in the paper: Academics at Harvard and other institutions have combed though Ramseyer’s sources and say there is no historical evidence of the contracts he describes.
In a statement calling for the article to be retracted, Harvard historians Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert said that Ramseyer “has not consulted a single actual contract” dealing with comfort women.
“We do not see how Ramseyer can make credible claims, in extremely emphatic wording, about contracts he has not read,” they wrote.
Alexis Dudden, a historian of modern Japan and Korea at the University of Connecticut, called the article a “total fabrication” that disregards decades of research.
Although some have invoked academic freedom to defend Ramseyer, Dudden said that the article “does not meet the requirements of academic integrity.”
“These are assertions out of thin air,” she said. “It’s very clear from his writing and his sources that he has never seen a contract.”
More than 1,000 economists have signed a separate letter condemning the article, saying it misuses economic theory “as a cover to legitimize horrific atrocities.”
At Harvard, hundreds of students signed a petition demanding an apology from Ramseyer and a university response to the complaints against him.
Harvard Law School declined to comment.
A UN report in 1996 concluded that the comfort women were sex slaves taken through “violence and outright coercion.”
A statement from Japan in 1993 acknowledged that women were taken “against their own will,” although the nation’s leaders later denied it.
Tensions flared again in January when a South Korean court ruled that the Japanese government must pay 100 million won (US$88,261 at the current exchange rate) to each of 12 women who sued in 2013 over their wartime sufferings.
Japan says that all wartime compensation issues were settled under a 1965 treaty normalizing relations with South Korea.
In South Korea, Ramseyer has been denounced and there have been calls for his resignation from Harvard.
Lee Yong-soo, a 92-year-old South Korean victim, described Ramseyer’s assertion as “ludicrous” and demanded that he apologize.
Lee is campaigning for South Korea and Japan to settle the impasse by seeking a judgement from the International Court of Justice.
“That professor should be dragged to [the International Court of Justice], too,” Lee said when asked about Ramseyer on Wednesday last week.
The controversy, amplified by its source at an Ivy League university, has yielded new scrutiny of Ramseyer’s other work.
In response to new concerns raised by academics, the European Journal of Law and Economics added an editor’s note saying that it is investigating an article by Ramseyer about Koreans who lived in early 20th-century Japan.
Ramseyer repeated his comfort women claims in a submission to a Japanese news Web site in January.
In it, he said the women entered into contracts similar to those used under a separate, licensed system of prostitution in Japan. He rejected accounts of forced labor as “pure fiction,” saying that the Japanese army “did not dragoon Korean women to work in its brothels.”
“Expressing sympathy to elderly women who have had a rough life is fine,” he wrote. “Paying money to an ally in order to rebuild a stable relationship is fine. But the claims about enslaved Korean comfort women are historically untrue.”
Opponents say that many of the women were so young they would have been unable to consent to sex even if there was evidence of contracts.
“We’re really talking about 15-year-olds,” Dudden said. “This article further victimizes the very few number of survivors by asserting claims that even the author knows cannot be substantiated.”
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