CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (AP) – A Harvard University professor has ignited an international uproar and faces intense scrutiny for alleged that Korean women who remained sex slaves in Japan during the war had opted for working as prostitutes.
In a recent academic paper, J. Mark Ramseyer rejected extensive research that found that Japan’s so-called “comfort women” they were forced to work in military brothels during World War II. Ramseyer argued that women willingly entered into contracts as sex workers.
His document has intensified a political dispute between Japan, whose leaders deny that women have been coerced, and South Korea, which has long pressured Japan to apologize and compensate women who have shared stories of rape and abuse.
Decades of research have explored the abuses inflicted on comfort women of 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 to the Japanese military.
Hundreds of scholars have signed letters condemning Ramseyer’s article, which united North and South Korea to provoke outrage. Last Tuesday, the North Korean DPRK, published today by the state, published an article calling Ramseyer a “disgusting money dealer” and a “pseudo scholar.”
Ramseyer, a professor of Japanese law at Harvard Law School, declined to comment.
Ramseyer’s article, titled “Hiring Sex in the Pacific War,” was published online in December and was scheduled to appear in the March issue of the International Journal of Law and Economics. However, the issue has been suspended and the magazine issued an “expression of concern” saying the piece is being investigated.
The most alarming thing for historians is what they say is a lack of evidence in the newspaper: Harvard academics and other institutions have combed Ramseyer’s sources and say there is no historical evidence of the contracts he describes.
In a statement calling for the article to be withdrawn, Harvard historians Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert said Ramseyer “has not consulted a single real contract” dealing with comfort women.
“We don’t see how Ramseyer can make credible claims, with extremely emphatic wording, about contracts he hasn’t read,” they wrote.
Alexis Dudden, a historian of modern Japan and Korea at the University of Connecticut, called the article “total manufacturing” that ignores decades of research. While some have invoked academic freedom to defend Ramseyer, Dudden counters that the article “does not meet the requirements of academic integrity.”
“They’re affirmations of nothingness,” he said. “It is clear from his writing and his sources that he has never seen any 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.” A separate group of Japanese historians published a 30-page article explaining why the article should be withdrawn “for reasons of academic misconduct.”
At Harvard, hundreds of students signed a petition to apologize to Ramseyer and a college response to complaints against him. Harvard Law School declined to comment.
A 1996 United Nations report concluded that comfort women were sex slaves taken by “violence and direct coercion.” A statement from Japan in 1993 acknowledged that women were being taken “against their own will,” although later the nation’s leaders denied it.
Tensions resurfaced in January when a South Korean court ruled that the Japanese government should give 100 million won ($ 90,000) to each of the 12 women who sued in 2013 for their war suffering. Japan insists that all compensation problems during the war were resolved under a 1965 treaty that normalized relations with South Korea.
In South Korea, activists have denounced Ramseyer and called for Harvard’s resignation. Chung Young-ai, South Korea’s minister for gender and family equality, expressed dismay at the article last week.
“There is an attempt to distort (the facts above) the issue of the ‘women of consolation’ of the Japanese army and tarnish the honors and dignity of the victims,” Chung said, according to comments from his ministry.
Lee Yong-soo, a 92-year-old South Korean survivor, described Ramseyer’s claim as “ridiculous” and apologized.
An influential activist, Lee campaigns for South Korea and Japan to resolve their decades-long stalemate seeking trial of the International Court of Justice.
When asked about Ramseyer last Wednesday, Lee said, “This professor should also be dragged into (the ICJ).”
The controversy, amplified by its source at an Ivy League university, has led to a new examination of Ramseyer’s other work.
In response to new concerns raised by academics, The European Journal of Law and Economics added a note from the editor saying it was investigating a recent piece by Ramseyer: it studies Koreans living in early twentieth-century Japan. Cambridge University Press said an upcoming book chapter by Ramseyer “will be reviewed by the author after consultation between the author and the book’s editors.”
Ramseyer repeated his claims about comfort women in a presentation to a Japanese news site in January. In it, he claimed that the women had contracted contracts similar to those used under an independent, licensed prostitution system in Japan. He dismissed reports of forced labor as “pure fiction,” saying the Japanese military “did not make Korean women work in their brothels.”
“Expressing sympathy to older women who have had a difficult life is fine,” she wrote. “Paying money to an ally to rebuild a stable relationship is fine. But the claims about enslaved Korean women of consolation are historically false. “
Opponents reject that many of the women were so young that they would not have been able to consent to sex even if there was evidence of contracts.
“We’re really talking about 15-year-olds,” Dudden said at the University of Connecticut. “This article also victimizes the very small number of survivors by claiming claims that even the author knows cannot be justified.”
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Associated Press writers Hyung-jin Kim and Kim Tong-hyung contributed from Seoul.