Mark Ramsayer, Harvard Law School ProfessorMark Ramsayer, a professor at Harvard University Law School in the U.S., who defined Japanese military comfort women victims as’prostitutes’, is expected to revise a dissertation that distorted the massacre of Koreans in the Great Kanto Earthquake.
Prof. Ramsay’s thesis “Vigilante: Japanese Police, Korean Massacre and Private Security Company” will be published in an academic journal (handbook) published on the subject of “privatization” by the University of Cambridge in the UK in August this year.
Alon Harrell, a law school professor at the Hebrew University of Israel, co-editor of the Privatization Handbook, admitted Ramsey’s thesis as a “very unfortunate mistake” in a recent email interview with Yonhap News.
Professor Harrell said that Ramsey deleted the thesis from SSRN, a pre-publication site for the thesis, and that “there will be nothing in the original text” in a handbook printed half a year later.
The editorial staff delivered very specific and critical comments to Professor Ramsey, and Professor Harrell introduced that he indicated that he would “significantly” revise his paper accordingly.
The request for correction included claims that the Koreans exhibited a violent tendency during the Great Kanto Earthquake, and Professor Ramzier explained that “it is only a rumor that I heard from Japanese sources.”
Professor Harrell confessed that he was not familiar with the history of when Japan occupied the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945, and “I assumed Professor Ramsey would know more history than we do.”
At the same time, he added, “I took immediate measures to recover the damage,” after knowing the detailed history of what actually happened on the Korean Peninsula during the Japanese occupation.
In the thesis in question, it is true that Koreans lost their lives to Japanese vigilantes during the Great Kanto Earthquake in Japan in 1923, but the claim that the Japanese responded because the Koreans committed arson and other crimes.
Professor Ramsey presented demographic statistics that the proportion of men among Koreans in Japan was much higher, and among them, there were many young men, and the general theory that “young men have a high demographic crime rate anywhere in the world” regards all Koreans in Japan as a criminal group. Unfolding a strange logic.
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