hankyoreh

Lee Yong-su (on left) and other former comfort women talk about a damages lawsuit filed against the Japanese government in the office of MINBYUN-Lawyers for a Democratic Society in Seoul on Nov. 13, 2019. (Photo by Baek So-ah)

After an academic journal published a paper by a professor at Harvard University that describes the comfort women as “prostitutes,” a far-right newspaper in Japan put the spotlight on his paper. The claim is an unacceptable smear on women who were dragged off to battlefields where they suffered human rights violations that have haunted them for their entire lives. It’s also an intolerable calumny of the efforts of women around the world who are opposed to sexual violence in wartime.

Mark Ramseyer, a professor at Harvard Law School, published a paper titled “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War” in the International Review of Law and Economics, in which he slammed the former comfort women as prostitutes who had entered contracts with brokers and been paid large amounts of money. This overt distortion of history denies the involvement and responsibility of the Japanese government and military.

Ramseyer is the Mitsubishi professor of Japanese legal studies at Harvard Law School. The position was created with a donation of US$1 million from Mitsubishi, a Japanese company that committed crimes during World War II, including the conscription of Koreans for forced labor. In 2018, Ramseyer was also awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, by the Japanese government for his contributions to Japan.

Even though Ramseyer’s specialties are Japanese legal studies and economic analysis of law — rather than history — he has repeatedly published papers that parrot the Japanese far right’s claims about the comfort women and the history of compulsory mobilization.

In an interview in 2019, Ramseyer said that the Koreans who were sent to Mitsubishi were “lucky.” He admitted in the same interview that he hadn’t “looked at any of the [Korean language] documents” about compulsory mobilization. His attitude is disgusting.

For Ramseyer to stand with the Japanese far right and distort Japan’s history of aggression and human rights violations – while being supported by a Japanese company that is itself guilty of war crimes – is a manifest conflict of interest and a betrayal of his conscience as a scholar.

The Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese far-right daily, recently covered Ramseyer’s paper on the comfort women in an article titled, “Rejection of ‘comfort women = sex slaves’ equation is spreading around the world.” In reality, Japan’s far right is raising money to create a pro-Japanese front in the US and recruit friendly scholars to spread claims around the world that downplay Japan’s responsibility for its wars of aggression.

That coincides with a recent attempt at historical revisionism by pro-Japanese scholars in South Korea with their publication of the book “Anti-Japan Tribalism.”

But try as such figures might to cover up Japan’s historical crimes, they can’t hold back the tide of the international human rights movement, which is committed to stopping the recurrence of the tragedy of sexual violence in wartime, such as the kind perpetrated against the comfort women by the Japanese military.

Ramseyer ought to apologize to the former comfort women, and to people around the world who are opposed to wartime sexual violence.

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