The Ramseyer Controversy

It's 2021 and this is still a topic for debate, and the occurrence, denied. What is it? A nation's pride? World War II happened. Atrocities happened. Perpetrators and victims. Both sides, interchangeable. But the historical narrative has to be argued for each nation to retain its 'integrity'. 

History, has always been written by victors. Seven decades after 1945, the Korea and Japan are still at loggerheads, and imho, Japan is in denial. Which is pretty much what the country's government's default reaction to everything. The country is being very optimistic in sweeping things under the carpet, and their preferred course of action is extremely obvious in their initial handling of the pandemic. 

To read some carefully structured claims against the existence of 'Korean comfort women' (and other races too, in the entire destruction trail of the Japanese Imperial Army) written by a Harvard Law School professor is rather annoying. Not that one could trust anything coming out on an American paper nowadays. I raised eyes at this whole debate raised by the claims of J. Mark Ramseyer, a Harvard Law School professor and Japanese legal-studies scholar, who said that the story of Korean comfort women was "pure fiction". 

Ramseyer had made his views clear in “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” an article published online, in December, by the peer-reviewed journal International Review of Law and Economics (and forthcoming in print, this March), and in an op-ed published on January 12th in Japan Forward, an English-language Web site of Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper known for its conservative-nationalist bent. Read together, their message was unmistakable: the comfort-women system was not one in which Korean women were forced, coerced, and deceived into sexual servitude and confined under threat of violence. Ramseyer called that account “pure fiction.” Instead, he claimed that Korean comfort women “chose prostitution” and entered “multi-year indenture” agreements with entrepreneurs to work at war-front “brothels” in China and Southeast Asia. Purporting to use game theory, he said that the economic structure of the contracts reflected that the sex work was voluntarily chosen. “Prostitutes have followed armies everywhere, and they followed the Japanese army in Asia,” he wrote.

Japan reported Ramseyer's opinions favorably of course. His opinions, however, created a huge furore in South Korea, and North Korea, and then across the oceans to the US State Department, which came out to effectively to refute his claims. Even if some Korean comfort women freely entered the agreement for sex work, many wouldn't have done so. This is not a conscription for an army of sex workers. There would be a fair portion of those who have been coerced or duped. Nobody in Asia would describe a prostitute as a prostitute, FFS. The true nature of sex work is always hidden away from the judging eye of society, and any labels attached to sex work in describing the job are always euphemistic.

I find Ramseyer's claims shortsighted, rather stupid, and disgusting. Hello, not finding any Korean contracts means the entire issue is a non-issue and it didn't happen, right? What a wonderful conjecture. If we don't resolve this entire issue of 'comfort women', those 'women' in question, those who are still living, are in their nineties and would die soon. Then there wouldn't be many left to speak up if they didn't leave an oral account behind with historians. 

Many fellow academics across the globe protested Ramseyer's claims, and wrote to the journals to ask for his article to be retracted, and upcoming article withheld. There were petitions, emails flying around, rebuttal articles, et cetera. This thorny issue between Korea and Japan will remain thorny forever if neither side acquiesce to anything. And both countries can rightly assert, 'why should we?'

Fellow faculty colleague of Ramseyer's at Harvard Law School, Jeannie Suk Gersen had to respond in an article published in The New Yorker on February 25, 2021, 'Seeking The True Story of the Comfort Women'. The article has been translated into Korean and Japanese, to reach a further audience. 

The history of the comfort women has presented a persistent obstacle for decades in the relations between Korea and Japan, which have been characterized by cycles in which Japan alternately acknowledges and denies responsibility, and Korea demands apology and rejects resolutions as insufficient. In the most recent iteration of the conflict, in January, a South Korean court ordered Japan to pay compensation to a group of comfort women, and Japan declared the legal order illegitimate. By making extreme denialist claims about the history of comfort women at this fraught moment, Ramseyer attracted outsized attention in Japan, Korea, and beyond. I had previously written on legal issues around the comfort women and had planned to do so again. As Ramseyer’s colleague on the faculty at Harvard Law School, I needed to try to understand both his arguments and other scholars’ findings about them—not least because my position as the first Asian-American woman professor and only ethnic Korean to receive tenure at the law school created expectations that I would speak on the matter.

I have no doubt about the brutality of the Japanese soldiers, of the cruelties they inflicted upon the countries in this sphere of the war, of which they enthusiastically and ironically termed as the 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere' for the painful years of 1942 to 1945. Their cruelty had been recorded in photographs, official reports and oral history. Even to a layman like me, who can do research, found so many fallacious points and sweeping statements in Ramseyer's articles, which could be cross-checked with other historical documents and academic papers, and then refuted point by point. How could Ramseyer be so blind? 

For my own reading, I hunted down the articles in question, and retrieved the rebuttals and those who supported his comments. The job of an academic is not to write fiction and pass on well-written fiction. Claims must be supported and grounded by hard evidence and facts. You're an investigator first and foremost before putting forth any theories. However, too many people twists the arguments and facts to support their own views and prejudices. 

In the course of seventy-five fraught years, from the end of the Second World War and of Japanese colonialism to today, the Korean grievance that Japan has not sincerely taken responsibility for its actions has been yoked with the Japanese sense that Korea has repeatedly moved the goalposts and can never be satisfied. The Ramseyer controversy could not be more perfectly timed and ready-made to aggravate those dynamics, although I have no reason to believe it was done so by design. As I neared the end of this journey, I reached out to Ramseyer again to see if we could understand each other’s developing thoughts. By then, I’d spent much of the past month steeped in his sentences, logic, and sources—with hours of meticulous help from expert scholars of Japanese. He said he would pass and explain himself in his own time, which I could understand.