Non-Korean victims, scholars, civic groups join protest against Ramseyer's paper on sex slavery

Students of Gyeseong High School denounce Harvard Law School Professor Mark Ramseyer's paper on wartime sex slavery during a rally in Seoul behind statues symbolizing Korean and Chinese sex slaves, Thursday. Yonhap

By Kang Seung-woo

Criticism concerning Harvard Law School's Mitsubishi Professor Mark Ramseyer's paper depicting Japan's wartime sex slavery as "voluntary prostitution" is growing beyond Korea.

The reason for wider interest is partly because there were victims from countries other than Korea, and many scholars believe the paper did not properly reflect wartime sexual violence and human rights abuses. According to historians, more than 200,000 women, mostly Koreans, were forced to provide sex services in frontline brothels for Japanese soldiers from 1932 until the end of World War II, with dozens of the victims testifying that they were either deceived or coerced into sex slavery.

Lila Pilipina, an organization of Filipina survivors of wartime sex slavery, issued a statement recently opposing the assertions from Ramseyer's paper, "Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War," which is published in the March 2021 issue of the International Review of Law and Economics (IRLE).

"Ramseyer's paper is nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to discredit the whole narrative of Japanese wartime military sexual slavery," the organization said on Facebook, Feb. 16.

"It sanitizes the horrors of military sexual servitude in a language that also makes the abuse of colonial conquest sound so clinical. It makes not even the slightest pretense of being a work of scientific value, peppered as it is with the author's own highly subjective interpretation of events."

The organization also claimed that the Japanese government has long been engaged in historical denial and revisionism, using dubious methods of historical research serving to obfuscate issues related to Japanese military expansionism and its abuses.

"With the Japanese government renewing its place in international military adventurism, as the junior partner to the U.S. in the strategic military alliance of the Asia-Pacific, such revisionism serves the purpose both of the Japanese government being able to deny its responsibility for past deeds, and also, of conveniently justifying Japan's return to the path of militarism and hegemonic wars," it added.

Five scholars studying Japanese history, led by Amy Stanley, a professor of History at Northwestern University, have sent a second open letter to the IRLE editor-in-chief, urging the journal to retract the article, due to Ramseyer's inaccurate and inappropriate citations.

"When we turned to Ramseyer's peer-reviewed article in the academic journal IRLE to evaluate its argument, what we found further alarmed us: distortion, misrepresentation, misdirection and omission of historical sources," the Feb. 24 letter said. The historians sent the first open letter on Feb. 18.

"Its inaccuracies are more than superficial errors; they completely undermine the article's claims. Indeed, if the sources were portrayed accurately, the argument would collapse. For this reason, we believe that the article should be retracted," it added.

Separately from the five scholars' letters, economists and historians across the world have signed the "Letter by Concerned Economists Regarding Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War in the International Review of Law and Economics." The letter gained nearly 2,000 signatories as of Friday afternoon, including Harvard University economics professor Eric Maskin, a 2007 Nobel laureate.

Fight for Justice, a Japanese civic group, said on Friday that it would hold an online seminar on March 14 to talk about the distortions of history put forth in Ramseyer's paper.

The group said discourses denying sex slavery, such as "comfort women are voluntary prostitutes," have been repeatedly asserted by Japanese historical revisionists since the late 1990s, and all of them have already been refuted by historical researchers. "Comfort women" is a translated Japanese euphemism for sex slaves.

The group also pointed out that Ramseyer's other treatise, to be published in the "Cambridge Handbook of Privatization" in August, describes Koreans living in Japan under colonial rule in a discriminatory fashion without proper evidence. In the paper, citing rumors, he depicted Koreans at the time of the post-earthquake chaos around Tokyo in 1923 as "gangs" that torched buildings, planted bombs, poisoned water supplies and murdered and raped people. These rumors were used at the time to justify mass murder of Koreans in the aftermath of the earthquake.


Kang Seung-woo ksw@koreatimes.co.kr

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