I was looking for a picture of a peoples' demo against Ramseyer at Harvard University

on 3-01-2021 by Korean protesters. But I didn't find one yet.

But I found this article instead, getting a bitter taste in my mouth.

I am hoping this article serves as a vitamin for Korean Americans.

John Mark Ramseyer (born c. 1954) is the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law Schooland a leading scholar of Japanese law and law and economics. He is the author of over 10 books and 50 articles in scholarly journals.^[1] He is known as co-author of one of the leading corporations casebooks, Klein, Ramseyer & Bainbridge, Business Associations, Cases and Materials on Agency, Partnerships, Llcs, and Corporations, now in its 10th edition.^[2] In 2018 he was awarded Japan's Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon in recognition of "his extensive contributions to the development of Japanese studies in the U.S. and the promotion of understanding toward Japanese society and culture."^[3][4]

In 2021, Ramseyer came under scrutiny for a pattern of questionable writing on minority groups in Japan, including Koreans, Okinawans, and Burakumin. In February of that year he emerged at the center of controversy for a denialist article published in the International Review of Law and Economics which, drawing from nonexistent contracts, attempted to discredit the testimony of comfort women conscripted under Japanese imperial rule.^[5]

Education and careerEdit

• B.A., Goshen College 1976, History
• A.M., University of Michigan 1978, Japanese Studies
• J.D., Harvard Law School 1982

The child of Mennonite missionary parents, Ramseyer lived in Kyushu's Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan through the age of 18 and is fluent in Japanese. After clerking for Judge Stephen Breyer (then of the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, later on the Supreme Court), he practiced law at Chicago's Sidley & Austin. After teaching law at UCLA from 1986 to 1992, he moved first to the University Chicago School of Law and then, in 1998 to Harvard.^[6] He has taught at several Japanese universities including the University of Tokyo, Hitotsubashi University, and Tohoku University.^[7]

Academic controversiesEdit

In 2021, controversy followed the online publication of an article in the International Review of Law and Economicsregarding the comfort women coerced into sexual servitude in Japanese military brothels in the 1930s and 1940s. Ramseyer's article attracted controversy because of its mischaracterization of historical evidence and its manipulation of the testimony of survivors.^[8] Drawing from contracts he later admitted had never been located, Ramseyer described the comfort women as prostitutes, arguing that they "chose prostitution over those alternative opportunities because they believed prostitution offered them a better outcome.”^[9][10][11] Carter Eckert, Yoon Se Young Professor of Korean History at Harvard University, criticized Ramseyer's article as "woefully deficient, empirically, historically, and morally."^[12][13] Economists and Nobel laureates Alvin Roth and Paul Milgromcriticized the article and wrote that it "reminded [them] of Holocaust denial."^[14][15]

Also in 2021, Ramseyer emerged at the center of controversy over a forthcoming chapter in The Cambridge Handbook of Privatization from Cambridge University Press. Writing on the Kantō Massacre in which thousands of resident Koreans in Japan were murdered, Ramseyer depicted the Koreans as members of "gangs" who "torched buildings, planted bombs, [and] poisoned water supplies."

The Mennonites are members of certain Christian groups belonging to the church communities of Anabaptistdenominations named after Menno Simons (1496–1561) of Friesland. Through his writings, Simons articulated and formalized the teachings of earlier Swiss founders, with the early teachings of the Mennonites founded on the belief in both the mission and ministry of Jesus, which the original Anabaptist followers held with great conviction, despite persecution by various Roman Catholic and Protestant states. An early set of Mennonite beliefs was codified in the Dordrecht Confession of Faith in 1632,^[2] but the various groups do not hold to a common confession or creed.

Rather than fight, the majority of the early Mennonite followers survived by fleeing to neighboring states where ruling families were tolerant of their belief in believer's baptism. Over the years, Mennonites have become known as one of the historic peace churches, due to their commitment to pacifism.^[3]

In contemporary 21st century society, Mennonites are described either only as a religious denomination with members of different ethnic origins,^[4][5] or as both an ethnic group and a religious denomination. There is controversy among Mennonites about this issue, with some insisting that they are simply a religious group, while others argue that they form a distinct ethnic group.^[6] Historians and sociologists have increasingly started to treat Mennonites as an ethno-religious group,^[7] while others have begun to challenge that perception.^[8] Discussion also exists as to the term "ethnic Mennonite"; conservative Mennonite groups, who speak Pennsylvania German, Plautdietsch (Low German), or Bernese German fit well into the definition of an ethnic group, while more liberal groups and converts in developing countries do not.

There are roughly 2.1 million Anabaptists worldwide As of 2015(including Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites and many other Anabaptist groups formally part of the Mennonite World Conference).^[1]Mennonite congregations worldwide embody the full scope of Mennonite practice, from "plain people" to those who are indistinguishable in dress and appearance from the general population. Mennonites can be found in communities in 87 countries on six continents.^[9] The largest populations of Mennonites are found in Canada, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, India, and the United States.^[9] There are Mennonite colonies in Argentina, Belize, Bolivia,^[10] Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay,^[11] and Paraguay.^[12] Today, fewer than 500 Mennonites remain in Ukraine.^[13] A relatively small Mennonite presence, known as the Algemene Doopsgezinde Societeit, still continues in the Netherlands, where Simons was born.^{[14](from Internet)}

By reading the above, it is obvious this fellow, Ramseyer, sold his soul

to Japan and all her past history. He certainly should have been condemned 

by Harvard whose president instead condoned. What a shame!

I wasn't happy to learn that he studied at University of Michigan where

my older son graduated and successfully initiated the campaign for establishing 

department of Korean language and culture as president of Korean Student Asscociation

and Council at UM.

I know 'nothing' about this guy but I don’t get it clearly where/what kind of journal- academic? - he published.

Indeed, it is an issue THE journal remains responsible and not much of the department or college/university can be involved. In another word, they barked at the wrong tree, doc!!!

They ought to start from the journal he published like writing “Letter to the Editor” first so that he has no choice but has to reply with a logical explanation with proper references. Then, based on what he replied, they could demand to the Editor and its Reviewers/board to clarify how they accepted it with proper legitimate references. That’s the way they have to proceed and a simple demonstration has no merit whatsoever. If he has published on a non-academic newspaper, such demonstration might be more effective to force them to clarify how they wind up to have published. But to me, they bark on the wrong tree!!!!

BB Lee

P.S. I served almost my whole career- still do!- for the review on quite a few peer-reviewed academic journals as a reviewer if not an editor throughout the world so that I am so familiar with such false statement/accusation; if it were based on inappropriate references, it could be forwarded to the promotion/tenure board committee as an official complaint about the future use. 

It really doesn't matter whether this guy is a chair professor or not!!! 

http://m.koreatimes.com/article/20210302/1352479

램지어 논문 게재 예정 학술지, 3월호 이번달에 출간 안하기로

Here we go, professor BB.

Somebody is doing what you said.

Thank you for your invaluable insight, Professor,

and Dr. Ohn for finding the news that is so pertinent.

램지어 논문 게재 예정 학술지, 3월호 이번달에 출간 안하기로

2021-03-02 (화)

작게크게

 램지어에 3월31일까지 5주간 소명 기간 제공…학계 “논문 철회해야”

일본군 위안부 피해 왜곡 논문 게재를 예고한 국제학술지가 3월호를 이번 달에 출간하지 않기로 한 것으로 확인됐다.

네덜란드 출판사 엘스비어가 발행하는 법경제학국제리뷰(IRLE)의 에릭 헬런드 편집장은 논문 저자인 마크 램지어 하버드대 로스쿨 교수에게 이번달 31일까지 학계의 지적에 대한 반론을 요청했다고 2일 소식통이 전했다.

IRLE는 램지어 교수가 답변할 때까지 인쇄본 출간도 늦추기로 했다.
이에 따라 램지어 교수의 논문 '태평양 전쟁의 성계약'이 실릴 IRLE 3월호는 답변 마감 시한인 3월 31일을 넘겨 4월 이후에 출간될 전망이다.

당초 IRLE는 3월호 인쇄본을 3월 안에 발간할 예정이었다. 당초 헬런드 편집장도 이른 시일 내에 인쇄 여부를 결정하겠다는 방침을 주변에 알린 것으로 전해졌다.

한 학계 관계자는 "인쇄본 출간을 늦추는 것은 학술지에 논문을 게재한 다른 학자들에게도 피해를 주는 것이기 때문에 상당히 이례적인 결정"이라며 "램지어 교수에게 5주라는 긴 소명 시간을 준 배경이 궁금하다"고 말했다.

IRLE가 램지어 교수의 요청에 따라 인쇄본 출간까지 늦춰가면서 5주간의 소명 시간을 준 것이라면 논문에 문제점이 많다는 것을 자인한 것이나 마찬가지라는 해석이다.

학계에서 제기된 다양한 문제점을 소명하는데 시간이 부족할 정도로 논문이 허술하다는 방증이라는 이야기다.

현재 학계에선 램지어 교수의 논문이 증거가 없고 결론 도출 과정에서 기초적 오류가 있다는 반론이 잇따르는 상황이다.

위안부 계약서의 실체가 없고, 램지어 교수가 논문에서 주장을 합리화하는 논리로 사용했던 '게임 이론'에 대해서도 오류가 있다는 것이다.

또한 램지어 교수가 논문에서 각종 증언이나 문헌을 잘못 인용했다는 지적도 적지 않다.

다만 일각에선 IRLE가 학계의 반발에도 불구하고 출판을 강행하기 위해 램지어 교수에게 방어논리를 개발할 시간적 여유를 준 것이 아니냐는 시각도 존재한다.

학계에서는 IRLE가 인쇄본 출간을 늦추는 데 그치지 않고, 램지어 교수의 논문을 철회해야 한다는 요구가 확산하고 있다.

이진희 이스턴일리노이주립대 사학과 교수는 "학술지 윤리 강령을 보면 비윤리적 학술 출판 행위에 대한 심각한 우려가 제기될 경우 조사를 시행하고, 윤리 강령 위반 행위가 판명되었을 때는 결과를 학술지 독자에게 알리고 논문을 철회하는 것이 당연한 것으로 규정돼 있다"고 지적했다.

이어 이 교수는 "램지어 교수의 논문이 왜곡된 거짓 학문이라는 사실이 판명된 상태에서 학술지 측이 과오를 시정하는 것이 아니라 진실을 무시한 채 그대로 인쇄출판을 강행하겠다면 편집진과 학술 출판사에 대해서도 책임을 추궁해야 한다"고 강조했다.

<연합뉴스>

No, not a big deal, Dr. HJ. It is a piece of common knowledge among the senior(?) editors.

So, someone already rushed to take the action to stop the publication! It is a MISTAKE!!! They lost the best chance to get rid of Ramseyer, darn!!!! They should have waited TILL they published- 엎질러진 물!!!! Too late!

Anyhow, it is odd how then they figured out such a story before the publication?

You know what, HJ, somebody rushed to block its publication ONLY to give an escape route to this bastard! They should have waited quietly till they publish it and then start to take action so that they could ruin this guy’s career once and for all- usual impatience by Korean gene!!!-.

How?  Once published, not only this guy but also the publisher would become liable for the legal liability so that the publisher cannot bend back to support this bastard!!! For example, Ramseyer has to prove he didn’t lie on the ‘conflict of interests’- didn’t you say this guy is a chair professor endowed by Jap company? - for the publication!!!! To me, he will become very liable as the outcome of the publication with such response/outcry. If he should fail, I bet, then, his department can NOT ignore but has to submit this evidence of ethical as well as a legal violation to the college and all the way to the university. That’s the way they could get rid of him permanently.

Oh, yes, I know many of the top-level administrators of Elsevier not only for the medical journals I still serve as an editor and also reviewer but also the books I edited/wrote chapters, etc so that I know what they will do!!!! Too bad it is too late! They lost the best chance!!!

Anyhow, it sounds like he could get away with the help of the Elsevier group- based on what they do now, I can tell 100% sure! -. If the Editor in Chief – I don’t know the law journal but if it were same as medical journals - will simply add/invite one or more reviewers to split the opinion in even number to be sure and then invite a Commentary to write as he wants- if he/editor is pro-Korean, he would invite the guy/commentator who would write to deny the accusation of comfort women as ‘prostitutes’ or if he is a pro-Jap, then he could get another guy to write the supporting opinion on the ‘prostitutes’ role. Simple as that, doc!   

So Elsevier is not stupid to do 진실을 무시한 채 그대로 인쇄출판을 강행 but nicely detour to reach the goal if they wish, as I explained!  I am afraid to say it will become a ‘태산명동 서일필!!’, that is ‘Much Ado About Nothing’!

BB Lee

http://m.ny.koreadaily.com/news/read.asp?art_id=9116893

램지어 논문, 한인 교수가 막았다

조선인 학살 정당화와 일본 정부 군대의 주도적 역할을 부정하는 것은 나치의 유대인 학살인 홀로코스트를 부정하는 것과 다름없다는 지적을 추가했다.

홀로코스트까지 언급되자 이스라엘 학자들도 사안의 본질과 심각성을 이해하게 된 듯하다는 것이 이 교수의 설명이다

https://www.eiu.edu/asian_studies/personnel.php?id=jlee

Dr. Jinhee J Lee, Associate Professor of History

*Korea should make her a Samsung or Hyundai Professor of Harvard. 

이 논란에서 제일 나쁜 ignorant한 SOB는 Harvard 총장 Lawrence Bacow 라는 자다.

즉 Academic freedom은 틀린 내용의 외곡된 글도 허락할수 있다는 것인가?

이게 소위 Harvard의 Academic principle인가?

Ramseyer는 배가 고파서 할수없이 이 글을 썼을지 모르지만 Bacow는 

How can he approve that kind of article by one of his professors?

모든 비난과 Arguments는 이者 앞으로 보내져야한다.

Apparently, someone raised a firestorm to the president of Harvard. Then the president said

whatever written was a non-issue for him as it's up to the author's freedom of academic opinion.

I can not stand the damn arrogance of the president who should maintain the integrity of his university.

That's one thing from me. Another from Dr. Ohn was that the journal postponed the publication

for 5 weeks when a Korean professor protested that Ramseyer's article was not correct.

Dr. Ohn and you say that it would have been published, however, the journal has its own pride

and principle. So, it does not want to publish something that has the wrong content.

My opinion is that I can not blame the journal that's holding the publication of Ramseyer's article.

Maybe, the Korean professor should not have protested Ramseyer's article, so that it could

have been published on time and Ramseyer would have been punished by a public outcry.

I can not blame her (the Korean professor) as she did not want the bad article to be published

because, then, the whole world might believe what Ramseyer, the loyal Jappy's ass-kisser,

said was really the truth. Ramseyer's goal was to change the world opinion in favor of his master.

He probably could be successful as you know how stupid peoples are.

Here, nobody is at fault except the president of Harvard who ignored Korean protests.

I think (in my opinion) he was the true SOB among all these peoples and in these chains of events.

That's exactly what the title of the Korean news said. 

That arrogant guy, Larence Bacow, should be punished and hanged in a noose.

If "Bacow" acts like a "cow", he should be sent to a butcher's shop and we shall chew his "Galbi".

Please don't upset at me. This is my honest, not arrogant, "ACADEMIC" SNU opinion. ㅎ, ㅎ, ㅎ.

Aha, so the president of Harvard Univ(?) - or the dean of the college where Ramseyer's department belongs to?- had an interview I presume with the protesting Korean professor- or newspaper reporter?- and refused to endorse the protester's opinion and rejected to get involved in this guy's publication on this super sensitive issue of 'comfort women'!!! Well, too bad with such an embarrassing outcome to Koreans but they seemed to have started with the wrong button to be precise, doc!!!  As I said above, they barked at the wrong tree from the beginning only to get a humiliating reaction from the president or whoever as expected. How naive! So, they/protesters didn't expect such routine response/reaction as a formality even before they interviewed!!!

BTW, how can I cite/invite a couple of outsiders to peep into this topic here on this website? It would be nice to let me share some of the contents with my colleagues who are real experts on the issue of conflict of interests' and get their opinions.

Will remain,

BB Lee

P.S. Is there any possible access to this guy's manuscript to read, which brought such a firestorm?

P.S. I don't think the President or whatever the guy at Harvard even knows such issue of 'comfort women' and plainly evaded further involvement in the dispute. How interesting!!! Wish to know more about this 'interview' more in detail!

The manuscript may not be available until it gets published.

Or it may never get published. The Harvard president has nothing to do with publishing this article.

He was just covering Ramseyer without trying to know the true issue between Koreans and Jappys.

Being the big honcho at Harvard, I assume his arrogance must not know how high the sky is.

This asshole may think he is an emperor of the universe.

I  happened to write about this comfort women issue to one of my daughters up in Boston, Yoon-Sun Lee who is a chair professor of English literature at Wellesley and has very close relationship with Harvard group to find out whether she knows. Voila, what I got!

" There's a very long, detailed, and good piece in the New Yorker by Jeannie Suk Gersen (another professor at Harvard Law) that carefully reveals all the huge and gross mistakes that this Ramseyer makes in his obviously piece-of-shit article. If you can't get to the article (it may be behind a paywall), it interviews a lot of other scholars who point out that even the sources that Ramseyer himself cites contradict his argument, which has absolutely no historical or conceptual validity. Apparently the field he works in (law and economics) is very small, so the people who peer-review each other for this journal often read stuff about nations/historical periods they don't know anything about."

So the dispute over this guy has been around and not a new stuff. I will attach the story in the New Yorker by Jeannie Suk Gersen: Seeking the True Story of the Comfort Women _ The New Yorker.html-x ​and now I understand clearly. Amazing story!!!

BB Lee   

In case when you have a trouble to open the article on The New Yorker, I uploaded it as following; 

Students in Seoul protested an article by J. Mark Ramseyer, who argued that Korean women taken by Japan during the Second World War had chosen to be prostitutes.Photograph by Chris Jung / NurPhoto / Shutterstock 

In January, I was outlining an article I hoped to write about a recent judgment by a South Korean court ordering Japan to pay compensation for atrocities committed during the Second World War against “comfort women,” women and girls who were transported to war-front “comfort stations” to provide sexual services to soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army. The women were taken by force or entrapped by deception in many countries in and beyond Asia, but a large number came from Korea, which, at the time, was a colony of Japan. Estimates of the number of victims have ranged widely, from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. On January 23rd, Japan announced that the Korean court’s judgment, which ordered a compensation of ninety-one thousand and eight hundred dollars to be paid to each of the twelve Korean comfort women who were plaintiffs in the case (seven of whom had died since it was filed, in 2013), was “extremely regrettable and absolutely unacceptable.” Japan said that it was not subject to Korea’s jurisdiction and considered the matter to have been previously settled. I was ruminating on how legal decisions relating to Second World War crimes against humanity might help resolve or aggravate historical traumas that seem impossible to leave in the past—in part, because they have been mired in waves of conflict and denial about the truth of what happened.

On January 31st, I began to receive messages from students and alumni of Harvard Law School, where I am a professor, about a longtime colleague of mine, J. Mark Ramseyer, a corporate-law specialist in Japanese legal studies. I knew him slightly, as an unassuming man in his late sixties who had ridden bikes with my husband and once advised us on what Japanese knives to buy. A child and grandchild of American Mennonite missionaries in Asia, he grew up in Japan. I knew that his scholarly contributions had included debunking conventional wisdom about the postwar Japanese economy.

The students and alumni wrote to tell me that Ramseyer had become front-page news in South Korea, owing to two recent articles he had written that challenged the historical consensus on comfort women. 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.

The news of Ramseyer’s article had been reported favorably in Japan, and then made its way to Korea and across the globe. It was a controversy that was not merely academic but that could potentially affect the troubled diplomatic relations between Japan and Korea, and also the delicate role played by the United States as their mutual ally. In the U.S., two members of Congress tweeted that Ramseyer’s claims were “disgusting,” and the State Department affirmed that “the trafficking of women for sexual purposes by the Japanese military during World War II was an egregious violation of human rights.” I understood that messages about Ramseyer were being sent to me, specifically, because I was the first Asian-American woman, and the first and only ethnic Korean, to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. I was born in Seoul, and my parents were refugees from their ancestral home, in North Korea, during the Korean War. At least one alumnus wrote to say that, because of my position, ethnicity, feminism, and writing on matters of justice, my silence was “complicity.”

After I spent time digesting my colleague’s reasoning, I spoke with him to say that we were about to have a public disagreement, but that I would not be joining or encouraging any possible calls for institutional penalty for his exercise of academic freedom to engage in scholarship or express his opinion. I posted a brief critique of Ramseyer’s arguments on social media, explaining that contract analysis assumes voluntary bargaining by free agents, and that when sex is mandatory, without the option to refuse or walk away, it cannot fairly be described as contractual. I was confident that he would not have described it as such if he believed comfort women’s accounts of having been conscripted and confined by force, threats, deception, and coercion. It seemed to me that his view reflected a prior choice not to credit those accounts because he deemed them inconsistent, or, as he wrote, “self-interested” and “uncorroborated.” I noticed, however, that he did choose to credit Japanese government denials, even where they contradicted other statements by the government. Trying to read my colleague’s work most generously, I thought his views might be a product of a skepticism of generally accepted wisdom that had informed his academic career. I approached the matter in the vein of criticism and disagreement over facts, logic, and interpretation, regarding a subject that triggered strong emotions around nationalism and human rights. I expected that scholars, by delving into Ramseyer’s research, would be able to further assess the accuracy of his claims; I could not have imagined how straightforward and yet how mystifying that work would prove to be.

Despite how easy it may be to reduce the issue to a conflict between Korea and Japan, victim and perpetrator, or women and men, historians have carefully explored the features and meanings of the comfort-women system, which involved several hundred comfort stations in war-torn Asia, individuals of many nationalities, and myriad experiences. Scholars have debated the precise role that the Japanese military played, along with private recruiters, in procuring the women. In South Korea, reckoning with the role of native recruiters in entrapping fellow-Koreans, and with impoverished families in allowing their girls to be taken, has been difficult, to say the least. There have been debates about whether the phrase “sex slavery,” given its common associations with chattel slavery, best captures the non-chattel situation of abuse and rape in brutal confinement. Over decades, historians have determined that there was a range of force or coercion used against comfort women, but that violence and threats were endemic. By contrast, Ramseyer’s statements seemed intent on flattening the complexity down to a plain denial: Korean comfort women went to the war front as voluntary prostitutes.

The end of Japanese colonialism in Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and the Western Pacific, following the Empire’s surrender to the U.S. at the conclusion of the Second World War, began seven decades of recrimination, apology, and denial over Japan’s wartime atrocities. Japan recognized Korea’s independence in a peace treaty with the Allied Powers, signed in San Francisco, in 1951. In 1965, a treaty between South Korea and Japan normalized their relations, and the countries agreed that “the problems concerning property, rights, and interests” of each “have been settled completely and finally,” and that “no claims shall be made with respect to the measures relating” to them. The comfort women were not specifically mentioned, which led to later conflict about whether their claims had indeed been settled.

For decades, the issue of comfort women was not widely discussed in Korea, the society of which stigmatized and ostracized sexual-assault victims. But, by the early nineties, the survivors had begun to share their experiences publicly. In 1993, Japan issued the watershed Kono Statement, which admitted the Japanese military’s involvement in the comfort stations and in recruiting women “against their own will,” and said that “they lived in misery at comfort stations under a coercive atmosphere.” Japan extended “sincere apologies and remorse,” and promised to “face squarely the historical facts” with “firm determination never to repeat the same mistake by forever engraving such issues in our memories through the study and teaching of history.” But after Prime Minister Shinzō Abe took office, in 2006, Japan appeared to back away from the Kono Statement’s apologetic stance. Under Abe, the environment in Japan became “inhospitable to objective historical inquiry” on the subject of comfort women, as Alexis Dudden, a historian of modern Japan and Korea at the University of Connecticut, put it. A key example was an attempt by the Japanese Foreign Ministry, in 2014, to pressure McGraw Hill to erase several paragraphs on comfort women from one of its world-history textbooks; the publisher refused, citing scholars’ work in establishing historical facts. Abe lamented the outcome, saying, “This kind of textbook is being used in the United States, as we did not protest the things we should have, or we failed to correct the things we should have.”

In 2015, twenty historians in the U.S. (including my New Yorker colleague Jelani Cobb) published a letter in the magazine of the American Historical Association expressing “dismay at recent attempts by the Japanese government to suppress statements in history textbooks” about comfort women. They compared Japan’s efforts to erase Second World War atrocities to American education boards’ efforts to “rewrite school textbooks to obscure accounts of African American slavery.” One of the signatories was Andrew Gordon, a historian of modern Japan at Harvard University. Later that year, Gordon and Dudden were among the organizers of a separate letter about comfort women, which was eventually signed by hundreds of scholars of Japanese studies at universities on several continents. Referring to the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the scholars wrote that “the evidence makes clear that large numbers of women were held against their will and subjected to horrific brutality,” and that “only careful weighing and contextual evaluation of every trace of the past can produce a just history.” The scholars defended “the freedom of historical inquiry” and called upon governments to do the same.

Meanwhile, in South Korea, resentment about Japan’s attempts to downplay its responsibility had been building, sometimes hardening into intolerance of anything short of a purist story of the Japanese military kidnapping Korean virgins for sex slavery at gunpoint. In 2015, a Korean academic named Park Yu-ha was sued civilly by comfort women for defamation, and criminally indicted by Korean prosecutors, for the publication of a book that explored the role of Koreans in recruiting the women and the loving relationships that some comfort women developed with Japanese soldiers while they were confined in a “slavelike condition.” The book did not, as some have claimed, absolve Japan of responsibility or deny the comfort women’s brutal victimization. Gordon, the Harvard historian of modern Japan, signed onto a letter with sixty-six other scholars, in Japan and the U.S., expressing “great consternation and concern” at the South Korean government’s indictment of Park, and conveying appreciation for her book’s scholarly achievement. Park was ultimately found civilly liable, and was ordered to pay damages to comfort women; she was acquitted of the criminal defamation charges, with the trial court citing her academic freedom, but an appellate court overturned that verdict and fined her.

All the best,

BB Lee

I somehow forgot, embarrassingly, my youngest daughter, Yoona Lee at Seattle who is an editor/artist/activitist spent quite an amount of time to help Mme. Daesil Kim Gibson to write/translate the book: SILENCE BROKEN: KOREAN COMFORT WOMEN  in English about this 'comfort women' years ago, Yoona wrote me back about this comfort women saying;

Well, leave it to the self-righteous, highly credentialed white man to gaslight women of color. Again. If there's one thing worse than a Japanese apologist for Japanese atrocities against comfort women, it's a white Western male apologist who confidently assumes the cultural and historical authority to speak for a country and race he will never be a part of.  And of course, the other white male intellectual in this picture defends him—huge surprise there. "No issue" is code speak for "it doesn't affect me," just like he probably has "no issue" with racism, sexism, etc. 

We should let Dai Sil Kim-Gibson loose on them.   

BB Lee