US scholar backed by Japanese firm twists historical facts
A controversy has arisen over a Harvard University professor's paper on Japan's wartime sex slavery. In an academic journal, he claimed that “comfort women were prostitutes,” something a right-wing Japanese newspaper then gave prominent coverage to. It is truly appalling and unacceptable that the professor insulted the former sex slaves, who were mobilized by the Japanese army before and during World War II, suffered unspeakable human rights abuses, and lived in pain for their whole lives. He has thus also derided the efforts of women globally to oppose wartime sexual violence.
Professor John Mark Ramseyer of Harvard Law School published the thesis, titled “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War,” in the March issue of International Review of Law and Economics. In the paper, he described “comfort women” as prostitutes who made huge profits by dealing with brothel operators. By doing so, he absolved the Japanese government and military from their responsibility in committing crimes against humanity. He explicitly distorted historical facts.
Ramseyer is Mitsubishi professor of Japanese legal studies at Harvard Law School. Mitsubishi Group, an enterprise involved in war crimes that mobilized Koreans and put them into forced labor during WWII, provided him with the post by donating $1 million to Harvard. Professor Ramseyer also received a medal from the Japanese government for his contributions to Japan. As a major in Japanese law, he is not a history scholar; still, Ramseyer has released a series of papers on sex slavery and forced labor victims, making claims identical to those of the Japanese right wing.
Ramseyer's acts of distorting the history of aggression and human rights violations, by taking sides with Japanese right-wing nationalists and receiving support from the Mitsubishi Group, present a clear case of a conflict of interest, as well as a denial of academic conscience.
However hard Japanese ultra right-wingers and their foreign friends might try to erase Japan's past atrocities, they will not be able to stem the tide of the international human rights movement, which refuses to allow a recurrence of wartime sexual violence, like the Japanese military's forceful mobilization of sex slaves. Professor Ramseyer must apologize to sexual slavery victims and all citizens of the world who oppose crimes against humanity.