2021/02/09-2 Richard W. Painter
https://twitter.com/RWPUSA/status/1358985993290977281
午後0:48 · 2021年2月9日
Here @JeannieSGersen at @Harvard_Law
demolishes incredibly sloppy research by Mark Ramseyer trying to prove that WW2 "comfort women" were prostitutes. These Korean women and girls were repeatedly raped by soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army. A war crime.
ここで、@Harvard_Lawの@JeannieSGersenが
第二次世界大戦の「従軍慰安婦」が売春婦であったことを証明しようとしたマーク・ラムゼイヤーの信じられないほど杜撰な研究を粉砕しています。これらの韓国人女性と少女は、日本帝国軍の兵士によって繰り返しレイプされました。戦争犯罪です。
https://twitter.com/JeannieSGersen/status/1358267692256493568
午後1:13 · 2021年2月7日
Jeannie Suk Gersen
@JeannieSGersen
Thread. 1: My colleague Mark Ramseyer @Harvard_Law
has written two recent articles that together make clear his view, that well-established historical accounts of atrocities against Korean and other Asian women by Japan during WW II are “historically untrue” and “pure fiction.”
スレッド 1: 私の同僚であるマーク・ラムゼイアー @Harvard_Law
は、第二次世界大戦中に日本が朝鮮人やその他のアジア人女性に対して行った残虐行為に関する歴史的に確立された記述は「歴史的に真実ではない」「純粋なフィクションである」という彼の見解を明らかにする2つの最近の記事を書いています。
https://twitter.com/JeannieSGersen/status/1358268441820602374
午後1:16 · 2021年2月7日
2:
@thecrimson reports on this today, including @harvard
historian Carter Eckert, a most responsible and measured scholar saying Ramseyer's work on this subject is “woefully deficient, empirically, historically, and morally.” https://thecrimson.com/article/2021/2/7/hls-paper-international-controversy/#.YB9j0QrJ1QQ.twitter.
Thecrimsonでは、@ハーバード大学の歴史学者であるCarter Eckert氏のレポートを掲載しています。
歴史学者のCarter Eckert氏は、この問題に関するRamseyer氏の研究は「経験的にも、歴史的にも、道徳的にも、ひどく欠陥がある」と述べ、最も責任感のある冷静な学者です。
The Harvard Crimson
By Ariel H. Kim and Simon J. Levien, Crimson Staff Writers
February 7, 2021
Harvard Professor’s Paper Claiming ‘Comfort Women’ in Imperial Japan Were Voluntarily Employed Stokes International Controversy
The Statue of Peace in front of the former Japanese Embassy in Seoul, South Korea commemorates comfort women, sex slaves taken by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. The slogans on the tarp behind the statue demand the Japanese government to make reparations. By Simon J. Levien
SEOUL, South Korea — A paper by Harvard Law School Japanese legal studies professor J. Mark Ramseyer that claims sex slaves taken by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II were actually recruited, contracted sex workers generated international controversy, academic criticism, and student petitions at Harvard this week.
The paper, “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” made headlines across South Korean media and was met with widespread public anger. Ramseyer’s work is set to be published in the March issue of the International Review of Law and Economics. Korean outlets picked up the news after Ramseyer’s paper was featured in a Jan. 28 press release in Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper.
Well-known worldwide for its conservative, nationalist bent, Sankei shared Ramseyer’s abstract with his permission, while adding that memorials to “comfort women” across Asia have spread a “false image” of Japan.
“Comfort women” — a loose translation of a Japanese euphemism for “prostitute” — refers to women and girls forced into sex slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army. Comfort women were held at brothels, or “comfort stations,” adjacent to Japanese military facilities to serve soldiers. The number of women enslaved from Japan’s occupied territories is disputed, but estimates range from the tens of thousands to up to 410,000, with many being of Korean descent.
Since World War II, Japan has propped up and dissolved compensation funds, dealt with lawsuits and investigations, and issued and walked back apologies to comfort women. Of the few surviving comfort women today, many have said they are still waiting for justice.
The U.N. Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International, and many notable scholars in Korea, Japan, the United States, and other countries have published extensive reports documenting the explicit sexual slavery of comfort women.
Ramseyer argues in his paper that comfort women were not coerced, but voluntarily employed under the terms of a contract.
Based on the title of Ramseyer’s professorship — the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies — many Korean media outlets and scholars suspected that he may be sponsored by the Japanese corporation.
Yuji Hosaka — a political science professor at Sejong University in Seoul often cited in Korean press — suggested in an interview the possibility that Mitsubishi donated money to the University to establish the professorship and give Ramseyer this role.
In an interview with The Crimson Friday, Ramseyer said he is not aware of the precise origin of the endowed professorship, but believes that Mitsubishi Group made an approximately $1.5 million donation to Harvard in the 1970s to back the position. He said, however, that there are “no strings” or money from Mitsubishi attached to his professorship today.
Spokespeople for the University and the Law School did not respond to a request for comment.
Hosaka also said he suspected Ramseyer’s work was influenced by his connections with the Japanese government. Ramseyer, who was raised in Japan, was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun in 2018, a Japanese government distinction for those who promote Japanese culture abroad.
Ramseyer acknowledged that he has friends who work for the Japanese government, but “absolutely” denied that those connections or the award had any influence on the paper.
Academics Question Paper’s Reasoning and Sources
Legal scholars and historians from South Korea and the United States said Ramseyer’s paper had several flaws in its reasoning and raised questions about the sources he used to back up those arguments.
Harvard Professor of Korean History Carter J. Eckert wrote in an emailed statement that Ramseyer’s article is “woefully deficient, empirically, historically, and morally.”
Eckert added that he and fellow Harvard History professor Andrew Gordon ’74 are preparing a critical response to Ramseyer’s article at the request of the journal.
University of Connecticut professor of Japanese and Korean history Alexis Dudden — who said she took a class taught by Ramseyer at the University of Chicago in the 1990s — said she was “shocked” when Ramseyer emailed her the article in December.
“It is a poorly resourced, evidentially fatuous piece of scholarly production,” she said. “It is conceptually misguided, because he’s not understanding not only the context, but what actually happened.”
Dudden said after reading the article, she wrote to Ramseyer, responding to inaccuracies she noticed in his logic.
Among the first things she noticed, she said, was that Ramseyer omitted “an intense body of scholarly archival Government of Japan evidence.”
Pyong Gap Min — a sociology professor at Queens College, City University of New York who has researched comfort women — said that Ramseyer based his claims solely off of Japanese “neo-national arguments.”
“He has the burden to refute previous studies that have demonstrated the comfort women system as sexual slavery,” he said.
Ramseyer said an early version of his paper included “disputes with historians,” but those sections were cut from the final version at the request of the journal in order to focus the article on the contracts.
The journal’s editors did not respond to a request for comment Saturday.
Several scholars also said they took issue with two of Ramseyer’s main arguments in the article.
The first is his claim that recruiters and brothel operators, rather than the Japanese government or military, were responsible for forcing women to work at the comfort stations.
“Ramseyer made the error of completely ignoring the fact that these recruiters were working under Japanese military or government orders,” Hosaka said in an interview conducted in Korean.
Japanese government documents provide evidence that the Japanese military secretly selected independent recruiters and forced them to operate comfort stations, Hosaka added.
Professor Seo Kyoung-duk, who teaches at Sungshin Women’s University in Seoul, said he agreed with Hosaka, citing a 1938 Japanese ministry notice on recruiting women to comfort stations.
Responding to the evidence that Hosaka, Seo, and other scholars have cited in their research, Ramseyer said the notion that there are documents confirming Japanese government involvement is “just wrong.”
“I don’t see anything that indicates that the Japanese government dragooned people into doing it,” he said.
Asked why he did not cite any Korean sources in the paper, Ramseyer said he is “very upfront” about the fact that he does not read Korean.
Several academics also disputed another one of Ramseyer’s claims in the paper: that comfort women willingly entered brothel contracts, from which they financially benefited, and after which they were able to return home.
“The comfort women system that the army was using is essentially an extension of the licensed prostitution system that was in effect in Japan,” Ramseyer said in the interview.
Hosaka argued, however, that the “comfort stations” that accompanied the Japanese military during WWII and the licensed brothels in Japan are entirely different.
Harvard Law School professor Noah R. Feldman ’92, who has studied comfort women and contract theory, also said Ramseyer’s claim is incorrect.
“The economic relationship that was deployed, even according to Ramseyer’s own research, is very close to what we would ordinarily call debt slavery,” Feldman said, comparing it to sharecropping contracts in the Jim Crow American South. “Such arrangements are designed to and do exploit the vast power discrepancy between different actors and institutions.”
Katharine H.S. Moon, a professor of Asian studies and political science at Wellesley College, wrote in an emailed statement that Ramseyer’s claim ignores the context in which women entered into contracts.
“How do we explain whether a 14- or 16-year-old girl knew what she was signing even if she signed it, especially in a Korean society at the time that was not accustomed to contracts and related legalism and didn’t grant such agency to girls and women?” Moon wrote.
Students React with Anger, Petitions
The Korean Association of Harvard Law School, led by law students Gabrielle J. Kim and Kikyung “Kik” Lee, released a statement Thursday condemning Ramseyer’s article as “factually inaccurate and misleading.” As of Saturday morning, the statement garnered more than 800 signatures, many from law students across the U.S.
The Harvard College Korean International Student Association also sent a press release to Korean newspapers Friday morning criticizing Ramseyer’s paper and laying out actions the organization plans to take in protest.
KISA also plans to send out a petition to Harvard affiliates, according to Yumi Lee ’21, one of its co-presidents.
Lee said the petition will contain a list of demands to Ramseyer, University administrators, and the academic journal publishing Ramseyer’s article. It will request that Ramseyer apologize “to comfort women for whom his claims may have reinforced painful trauma” and “to the Harvard University community for injuring the institution’s reputation and standards for academic soundness,” she said.
Lee also said KISA will demand that University President Lawrence S. Bacow and Law School Dean John F. Manning ’82 condemn Ramseyer’s research, and that the journal apologize for not upholding a rigorous peer review process and withdraw the article from its upcoming issue.
In a separate email to members Friday, KISA wrote that the Korean Consulate General in Boston is “aware of the situation” and may use KISA’s statement in an official communication. The consulate did not respond to a request for comment Friday.
Several Harvard undergraduates said they reacted with disbelief and disappointment when they first encountered news of the article in South Korean media.
“It was all over the news,” Alyssa Suh ’25, who currently resides in Seoul, said. “I was extremely angry and upset when I first saw that. We were colonized, and they don’t acknowledge that.”
“No one really knows about this piece of history in the States. The amount of Korean history that we learn is literally a paragraph,” Suh added.
Ike Jin Park ’20-’22 said if the history surrounding comfort women was more well-known in the U.S., there would be a greater outcry from students.
“As a Korean citizen myself, I was very uncomfortable,” Park said. “Imagine this was another issue that a lot of people in the West cared about. It simply wouldn’t be okay.”
Park also said he believes the University “needs to make a statement” and that he would like to see the paper taken down.
Esther E. Kim ’23 said she believes the article will damage Harvard’s reputation among Koreans.
“Especially because there is a lot of respect afforded to institutions like Harvard by the Korean community, by the Korean-American community, it is devastating to see that this could be accepted and published by a Harvard Law School professor,” she said.
Responding to student backlash, Ramseyer said he has a “responsibility to the students at the Law School” and is willing to speak with them about the paper.
Ramseyer also said he does not intend to pursue further research on this topic.
Though many scholars said they disagree with Ramseyer’s claims, several noted Ramseyer is protected by academic freedom to promote his opinions.
“His academic freedom entitles him to express whatever views he wishes without any form of university-based sanction,” Feldman said.
Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen wrote in an emailed statement that she was “proud” that HLS student organizations had released the statement “affirming the need to be historically accurate.”
“They have refrained from petitioning for measures that would impair my colleague’s academic freedom, and I would of course disapprove of any such calls,” she wrote.
“He has every right to his opinions and viewpoint, and we all equally have every right to criticize his reasoning and logic,” Gersen added.
—Staff writer Dohyun Kim contributed translation to this story.
—Staff writer Ariel H. Kim can be reached at ariel.kim@thecrimson.com.
—Staff writer Simon J. Levien can be reached at simon.levien@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @simonjlevien.
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午後1:19 · 2021年2月7日
3: Many have asked for my views on Ramseyer's claims, perhaps because I've published on Korean “comfort women,” because of my interest in Korea, and also because I happen to be the first Asian woman and first Korean professor and his colleague of 15 years.
3：多くの方からラムゼイアーの主張に対する私の見解を求められています。おそらく、私が韓国の「慰安婦」に関する論文を発表していることや、韓国に関心があること、また、たまたま私がアジア人女性初、韓国人初の教授であることなどが理由でしょう。
ハーバード大学法学部 と彼の15年来の同僚である。
午後1:22 · 2021年2月7日
4: I disagree with my colleague as deeply as it’s possible to disagree. For now, I’ll say I disagree with his interpretations of his sources, his wrong legal analysis, and even applying his own disciplinary terms, his reasoning fails. We talked, and he knows I disagree with him.
4: 同僚とは、可能な限り深く意見を異にする。今のところ、私は彼の資料の解釈、間違った法的分析、そして彼自身の規律用語を適用しても、彼の推論が失敗することに同意できないと言います。私たちは話をし、彼は私が彼に同意しないことを知っています。
午後1:31 · 2021年2月7日
5: No legal system would recognize or justly enforce contract of this nature. Even supporters of legalizing sex work would firmly reject the idea that contract law extends where people must have sex with thousands in order to become “free” of their “obligation," as he puts it.
5: このような性質の契約を認めたり、正当に執行したりする法制度はありません。セックスワークを合法化する支持者でさえ、彼が言うように、「義務」から「自由」になるために何千人もの人とセックスをしなければならないところに契約法が及ぶという考えをしっかりと否定するでしょう。
午後1:34 · 2021年2月7日
6: Crucial historical context: Korea was under Japanese colonial rule & imperial control, ended on Japan’s surrender to U.S. at WW2's end. The horrifying episode of “comfort women” reflected contempt toward Korean people & culture, the existence of which imperial Japan denied.
6：重要な歴史的背景。韓国は日本の植民地支配と帝国の支配下にあり、第二次世界大戦の終わりに日本が米国に降伏したことで終わった。慰安婦」というおぞましいエピソードは、日本帝国が否定していた韓国の人々や文化に対する蔑視を反映しています。
午後1:38 · 2021年2月7日
7: Contract presupposes agency of free actors to bargain at arms length. I believe in that possibility in many situations, sometimes even about sex. But people forced into sex in the context of this military occupation in WW2 weren't free agents exercising that form of agency.
7: 契約は、自由な行為者が腕ずくで交渉することを前提としている。私は多くの状況でその可能性を信じており、時にはセックスについてもそうです。しかし、第2次世界大戦の軍事占領下で強制的にセックスをさせられた人々は、そのような形の代理権を行使する自由な行為者ではありませんでした。
午後1:41 · 2021年2月7日
8: Ramseyer recognizes the women were not free to walk away until they fulfilled the “obligation” to have sex with thousands. In other words there was no possibility to breach the “employment contract” as there would be a just contract system. That is the definition of slavery.
8：ラムゼアは、女性たちが何千人とセックスするという「義務」を果たすまで、自由に立ち去ることができなかったと認識している。言い換えれば、公正な契約制度があるように、「雇用契約」に違反する可能性はなかったのです。それが奴隷制の定義です。
午後1:43 · 2021年2月7日
9: Therefore by his own logic, contract analysis is wrong analytically, apart from a question of moral outrageousness. His use of contract smuggles in agency but historical evidence from responsible scholars has indicated the agency normally associated w/ contract didn’t exist.
10: It would be a distraction and a red herring to suggest this is about people not liking law-and-economics, or about history being a different endeavor from L&E. No. It's legal analysis including claims about what is true. Response from all disciplines is perfectly appropriate.
10: これは、人々が法律経済学を好まないことや、歴史がL&Eとは異なる努力であることを示唆するもので、気をそらすものであり、また赤信号でもあるでしょう。そうではなく、何が真実であるかという主張を含む法的分析なのです。すべての分野からの反応は完全に適切です。
午後1:46 · 2021年2月7日
11: This is my academic freedom to respond to a colleague, who has exercised his academic freedom. I’m proud of the
@Harvard_Law
student groups' response to affirm the importance of factual and historical accuracy, and avoidance of denial of facts, particularly in this period.
午後1:51 · 2021年2月7日
12:
@Harvard_Law groups, @HLSAPALSA, KAHLS wrote this: https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/kahls/statements/.
I agree with its substance and also with their commitment to academic freedom. In a university, the proper response to conflicts about what is true or false is the pursuit of knowledge.
12: @Harvard_Law グループ ＠HLSAPALSA, KAHLSが書いたhttps://orgs.law.harvard.edu/kahls/statements/。
私はその内容に賛同するとともに、彼らの学問の自由への取り組みにも賛同します。大学では、何が真実か偽りかという対立に対する適切な対応は、知識を追求することです。
Statements
KAHLS Statement in Response to Professor J. Mark Ramseyer’s Article “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War”
Professor J. Mark Ramseyer, the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, recently published an article (“Contracting for sex in the Pacific War”) and accompanying editorial (“Recovering the Truth about the Comfort Women”), in which he describes the forced sex slavery organized by Japan during World War II as a consenting, contractual process. He claims, without sufficient evidence, that the Japanese military sex slaves were willing prostitutes who were able to “negotiate” for substantial wages in a consensual, contractual relationship. In his editorial, he also makes multiple assertions that the comfort women story is “pure fiction,” a revisionist claim that is recycled time and time again by neonationalist figures.
Professor Ramseyer’s arguments are factually inaccurate and misleading. Without any convincing evidence, Professor Ramseyer argues that no government “forced women into prostitution,” a contention he also makes in his editorial. Decades’ worth of Korean scholarship, primary sources, and third-party reports challenge this characterization. None are mentioned, cited, or considered in his arguments.
Professor Ramseyer’s deficient presentation of the historical record is demonstrated by his bibliography. Korean perspectives and scholarship, both rich sources of material on this topic, are almost completely absent in his work. Scholars studying history understand the possibility of post-hoc revisionism and bias. To counter such effects, they consult a wide-ranging set of materials from a variety of sources. Professor Ramseyer does not.
He also ignores expansive scholarship done by international organizations, such as the United Nations and Amnesty International, which has conclusively found that the “comfort women” were coerced, kidnapped, or forced by the Japanese government. After its independent inquiry, the Japanese government itself acknowledged as part of the Kono Statement that “the then Japanese military was, directly or indirectly, involved in the establishment and management of comfort stations.”
As students of law and democracy, we are committed to a fair presentation of diverse perspectives. Our professors stress the fundamental importance of bringing multiple perspectives to a discussion. Again, Professor Ramseyer’s article falls short in this regard. He does not engage with the historically validated and important perspectives of scholars who have worked to amplify the testimonies of these women. To ignore this work is to create the false impression of a settled history of an imagined world where Korean comfort women were free to contract for higher wages paid at their preferred schedule.
Analytically, Professor Ramseyer takes these contracts as a given. He suggests comfort women “negotiated” their contractual terms. Such value-neutral language erases important historical context of coercive sexual violence. He assumes away important issues of consent, duress, and power dynamics. As law students, we study the doctrines and equitable principles that have developed to correct for these issues in our first-year curriculum. As future lawyers, we recognize that much is still to be done, that settlements and non-disclosure agreements can do much to obscure latent coercion. As citizens of a world where sexual violence, denialism, and slavery run rampant, we call attention to misleading histories and economic analyses that callously suggest that these women negotiated into their own sexual slavery.
We, and the undersigned, strongly condemn the deliberate erasure of human rights violations and war crimes. Up to 200,000 women and girls were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, from not only Korea, but also China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Netherlands, East Timor, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and Burma. We stand with the victims who have yet to receive full reparations and a proper, official apology from the Japanese government. We strongly condemn all actions that inflict pain and insult to the victims, who bear witness to the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army.
As students, we have the utmost respect for academic freedom, including that of Professor Ramseyer. But at the same time, we firmly believe that a sincere commitment to academic freedom is inseparable from the obligation of academic integrity as part of a genuine search for truth. Upholding these values requires that we shed light on the failings of misleading narratives that omit important voices and obscure critical histories.
February 4, 2021
Korean Association of Harvard Law School (KAHLS)
Harvard Asian Pacific American Law Students Association (APALSA)
Harvard Law School China Law Association (CLA)
Harvard Asia Law Society (HALS)
Harvard South Asian Law Students Association (SALSA)
La Alianza at Harvard Law School
Harvard Law Entrepreneurship Project (HLEP) Board of Directors
Harvard Women’s Law Association (WLA) Executive Board
Harvard Law School Advocates for Human Rights
Harvard Law School Student Government
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午後1:53 · 2021年2月7日
13: Given my scholarly interest in all of the above, and Korean legal history and contemporary legal issues, I will take the time to publish more on these topics. Stay tuned. End of thread.
13：上記のすべて、そして韓国の法制史と現代の法律問題に対する私の学術的関心を考慮して、これらのトピックについて時間をかけてさらに発表していきます。期待していてください。このスレッドを終了します。
午後2:24 · 2021年2月7日
.@thecrimson quotes @NoahRFeldman
“The economic relationship...even according to Ramseyer’s own research, is very close to what we would ordinarily call debt slavery." Feldman compared it to sharecropping contracts in the Jim Crow South, which exploited vast power discrepancy.
.@thecrimson は @NoahRFeldman を引用しています。
"経済的な関係は...ラムゼア自身の研究によると、通常、債務奴隷と呼ばれるものに非常に近いものです。" フェルドマンは、ジム・クロウ・サウスでのシェアクロッピング契約と比較して、大きな力の差を利用しています。
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