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

J. Mark Ramseyer, the Harvard Law School professor who described the comfort women as prostitutes in a recent academic paper, said he would “leave it to others to continue this debate” about his paper.

The Harvard Crimson, the university’s campus newspaper, reported Monday that Ramseyer sent an email to colleagues at the Harvard Law School on Feb. 25 in which he said, “I want to be transparent about what did and didn’t go into the article and why. But this is not the main focus of my work.”

“This is an important and sensitive issue,” Ramseyer said in the email, adding, “I do not want to escalate the dispute further.”

Though Ramseyer said the paper is for others to debate, he also said he’s preparing a “memo and set of materials” that will help explain what he did and didn’t include in his paper and the reasons for those decisions.

In two emails to the Harvard Crimson last month, Ramseyer said he was preparing a short piece to defend his article and that it would soon be complete.

Ramseyer was a panelist in an online seminar called “The Carlos Ghosn Controversy and Japanese Corporate Governance,” organized by the program on US-Japan relations, on Monday.

Though Ramseyer has continued teaching his scheduled classes at the university, this was his first appearance at a public event since the controversy broke over his paper’s misrepresentation of the comfort women issue.

The seminar discussed problems with the Japanese judicial system that have come into focus following the dramatic escape from Japan by former Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn, who was charged with embezzlement and underreporting his compensation. During the seminar, Ramseyer spoke in defense of the Japanese judicial system.

As criticism of Ramseyer’s paper continues to spread, the foreign press has begun covering the issue. UK daily newspaper the Guardian published an article on Monday titled, “Harvard professor sparks outrage with claims about Japan's ‘comfort women.’”

Ramseyer’s view is “supported by Japanese ultra-conservatives seeking to whitewash their country’s wartime atrocities,” the Guardian reported, noting that “prominent academics challenged the veracity of Ramseyer’s research, saying they had found no historical evidence of the contracts he described.”

It’s not just the Guardian, though — the New York Times, Fox News and AP are among the major foreign news outlets that have recently covered criticism of Ramseyer’s paper.

By Kim So-youn, staff reporter