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J. Mark Ramseyer is a "Mitsubishi professor of Japanese legal studies" at Harvard Law School. His position was created with a donation of US$1 million by Mitsubishi, a company implicated in war crimes through its mobilization of Koreans during World War II. (JTBC news screenshot)

An academic paper by Harvard Law School professor J. Mark Ramseyer falsely portraying survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery as “prostitutes” is drawing ever louder international calls for its retraction. Harvard law students have organized seminars to hear the testimony of “comfort woman” survivor Lee Yong-soo, feminists around the world have shared statements of solidarity, and eminent scholars have offered point-by-point critiques of issues with the paper.

In a statement released on Feb. 17, two Harvard historians, Carter Eckert and Andrew Gordon, urged the International Review of Law and Economics to retract the paper, citing its “egregious violation of academic integrity.”

“As historians of Japan and Korea, what initially appalled us was Ramseyer’s elision of the larger political and economic contexts of colonialism and gender in which the comfort women system was conceived and implemented,” the professors wrote. They also noted that Ramseyer had not located a single actual contract related to Korean comfort women.

An open letter of solidarity issued by feminists around the world, including over 1,100 researchers and members of groups in Korea and overseas, similarly blasted Ramseyer’s argument, which they said “not only perpetuates egregious violence towards these women and the system’s contemporary implications but also colludes with and validates the Japanese state’s own intentional erasure of this violent history.”

The Harvard Law School students’ association has also protested the paper, and in a Feb. 16 seminar, human rights activist Lee Yong-soo, herself a survivor of wartime sexual slavery, angrily denounced Japan for “barging into Korea, dragging off girls and behaving lawlessly.”

“Over 70 years have passed, yet the Japanese government has not changed since then,” she said. Additionally, Korean groups in the US have been conducting an international campaign to petition for the paper’s retraction.

In a 1993 statement released by then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, the Japanese government acknowledged and apologized for its military’s involvement in the forced mobilization of comfort women. In 1996, the UN special rapporteur on human rights described the comfort women system as constituting “sexual slavery” and a “war crime” perpetrated in an organized and forcible manner by the Japanese military.

Yet Japanese right-wingers continue to fabricate history as a way of covering up responsibility. To defend Ramseyer’s paper — which is based on their own arguments — as an example of “academic freedom” threatens the international consensus that such inhumane crimes should never be allowed to happen again.

It’s time for the International Review of Law and Economy to retract Ramseyer’s paper, a work that distorts history and insults the victims of sexual violence without a shred of academic evidence. We also hope that Harvard officials will take appropriate measures, rather than continuing to stay quiet in the name of “academic freedom.”

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