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Harvard Law School professor J. Mark Ramseyer. (Screenshot from Harvard Law School website)

As Harvard Law School professor J. Mark Ramseyer continues to draw fire for an academic paper describing the comfort women as prostitutes, two history professors at Harvard University have attacked the paper for being deficient in “scholarly integrity.”

Carter Eckert, a professor in the department of East Asian languages and civilizations, and Andrew Gordon, a professor in the department of history, said in a statement on Feb. 17 that Ramseyer didn’t even cite sources to back up his claims in “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” the article that’s scheduled to appear in the March edition of the International Review of Law and Economics. Eckert’s specialty is Korean history, and Gordon’s specialty is modern Japanese history.

In their statement, the two professors explained that they’d reviewed Ramseyer’s paper at the request of the editor of the International Review of Law and Economics.

“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 said.

They went on to say, “But as we began to look into the article, its evidence, and its logic, we encountered a different and prior problem of the article’s scholarly integrity.”

“So far as we and other scholars can determine from tracking Ramseyer’s citations, he has not consulted a single actual contract concluded between a Korean comfort woman, or her family, and a recruiter or a comfort station, or even a sample contract that might have been provided for guidance by the Japanese government or military.”

Eckert and Gordon noted that a 1938 document from the Naimusho (the Japanese Home Ministry) that Ramseyer cited was a sample contract for Japanese women recruited to work at comfort stations in Shanghai. In short, the contract wasn’t intended for Koreans.

“We do not see how Ramseyer can make credible claims, in extremely emphatic wording, about contracts he has not read,” the professors said.

As part of their criticism, Eckert and Gordon observed that Ramseyer “offers virtually no documented third-party statements, oral or written, about contracts with Korean women,” even though those contracts represent the crux of his argument.

The only citations of such third-party statements are from a book about the journal of a Korean employee at a comfort station, which was later translated into Japanese. But even then, the professors say, Ramseyer’s citations are selective.

The professors also note that some of Ramseyer’s claims contradict historical facts. Ramseyer writes that “some Korean comfort women in Burma [Myanmar] worked on contracts as short as six months to a year,” but then cites a “sample contract written in Japanese in 1937.” They also note that 1937 was “years before the Japanese military was fighting in Burma.”

Ramseyer’s failure to cite any evidence of contracts made with Korean women or documents related to such contracts, the professors say, is “the most egregious violation of academic integrity in the article.”

“We have written to the journal requesting they suspend publication of this piece, conduct its own inquiry drawing on expert opinion, and pending the result, retract the article,” Eckert and Gordon said.

By Cho Ki-weon, staff reporter

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