▲ John Mark Ramseyer, professor of law at Harvard University, is causing ripples over the claim that’comfort women are prostitutes’. Ⓒ YouTube capture
John Mark Ramseyer, professor of law at Harvard University, has not admitted to the fault, who defined Japanese military comfort women victims as certified prostitutes and wrote “Magic Words” rather than “Thesis”. Not only at Harvard University, but also in the US Congress have criticized him for being’disgusting’, but he still sticks to his argument.
Born in 1954, Professor Ramsey spent his growing season in Japan. According to the introduction section of the professor on the website of Harvard Law School, he spent most of his childhood in southern Japan and then went to the US to enter university. Prior to enrolling in law school, I majored in Japanese history in graduate school, and then taught at various Japanese universities. I have a very deep relationship with Japan.
The thesis’Comfort Women and the Professors’ dated March 13, 2019 is introduced in the Professor Introduction section above. The first sentence of the abstract of this paper is impressive. “We in the West have embraced an odd narrative.”
The first sentence of the paper abstract “We accepted a strange narrative
The content of the’strange narrative’ appears in the next sentence. “We write that the Japanese military in the 1930s and 1940s forced nearly 200,000 Korean teenage girls to mobilize to rape camps called comfort stations,” he says.
The expression ‘200,000 teenage girls’ is not Korean, but Ramsay himself used it in exaggeration, but he takes it as a’strange narrative’ to say that this has happened. He argues that this forced mobilization did not actually happen.
“Only a handful of comfort women claim to have been recruited,” he said. Few women testify that they were forced to go. It is a claim that overlooked the fact that revealing that he was a victim of comfort women is bound to be an adventure in any society.
“The story of forced military mobilization isn’t really true,” Ramsey says. “It’s hard to believe and there’s no written evidence.” It is asking for’documented evidence’ to prove the forced mobilization of the comfort women. “In fact, no one has found documented evidence that the Japanese military forced Korean women to be mobilized as comfort stations,” he says.
“Comfort stations were prepared at the request of the military authorities at the time, and the establishment and management of comfort stations,” announced on August 4, 1993 by Secretary General Yohei Kono (a cabinet spokesman), the father of the Minister for Administrative Reform. As for the transfer of comfort women and comfort women, the former Japanese military had already been directly or indirectly involved.”
This discourse has not been officially denied by the Cabinet of Shinzo Abe and the Cabinet of Yoshihide Suga. Ramsey is denying that the Liberal Democratic Party’s government cabinet Kiichi Miyazawa forced to admit based on facts.
It is a fact that the Japanese LDP also acknowledged
▲ On the 16th, former Japanese Secretary of State Yohei Kono, who announced a narrative of Kono, acknowledging the compulsory mobilization of comfort women in the Japanese military, gives a congratulatory speech at the symposium in commemorating the establishment of the Korean Studies Institute at Waseda University. Former Minister Kono stressed, “If the relationship between Korea and Japan cannot be resolved well, there will be economic losses and there are times when the relationship between Korea and Japan is important to security, but the most important thing is understanding between people and people.” 2013.12.16 ⓒ Yonhap News
From a local perspective, on the 4th, Korean, Chinese, and Asian students of Harvard University said in a condemning statement against Professor Ramsey, “You can see that Professor Ramsey did not faithfully present the historical facts by looking at the references in the thesis.” He pointed out that he rarely mentioned Korean perspectives and academic writings in his research.” He also criticized “Ignore a wide range of academic data from international organizations such as the United Nations and Amnesty International.”
<국제 법경제학지(International Review of Law and Economics)> ‘Contracting for sex in the Pacific War’, the paper to be published in the March issue, also has many problems. This thesis revealed the problem of not considering the actual reality of comfort women.
In this paper, Ramsayer says that the comfort women signed short-term contracts of one or two years shorter than the usual contract period, received a high amount of advance payment, and were able to withdraw from the contract relationship even before expiration. Since such a contract could make the life of a comfort woman unfavorable, conditions favorable to the comfort women as a safeguard for fulfillment of the contract were stipulated.
However, this claim is far from reality. This is the case with the claim that the comfort women received high sums. This overlooked the fact that their income was only a number on the books. Professor Young-Hoon Lee said that the comfort women made a lot of money. <반일 종족주의>This point is well proven in the case of Moon Ok-ju mentioned in.
<반일 종족주의>Lee Young-hoon claims that Moon Ok-ju earned 26,651 yen from August 1943 to September 1945. In 1943, the annual salary of a lieutenant general of the Japanese Army was 5800 yen, which means that Ok-ju Moon received a four-year lieutenant general’s salary in just two years. This is to say that Japanese military sexual slaves earned more than twice the income of Japanese military generals.
But as of May 13, 1992 <한겨레>Cited in <교도통신> As reported in the report, Moon Ok-ju’s income only existed as a ledger. It was not paid to me. As of May 17, 2016 <연합뉴스> As reported in the article’Comfort women victims’ testimony of late Ok-ju Moon, record matching’, Moon Ok-ju did not receive money back until he passed away in 1996. I went to Japan on May 11, 1992 and asked for money, but the Japanese government did not return it.
The fact that the comfort women did not actually receive money was reported in the media from the early 1990s. Ramsay wrote the thesis without even confirming this basic fact.
The same problem as not having blasphemed comfort women or counting the wounds of comfort women is that they did not review basic facts before writing. In a situation where voices of comfort women have been sexually exploited are spreading around the world, they have not confirmed what evidence is presented by those who make such a voice. The fact that his thesis was composed solely on the arguments of the Japanese far right raises doubts about whether he is entitled to write on this matter.
Koreans defending Ramsey
▲ Lee Young-hoon, former Seoul National University professor who appeared on the YouTube channel Syngman Rhee TV ⓒ Syngman Rhee TV
What is even more embarrassing, though, is that there are not only Japan but also South Korea who defend Ramsay. These include Young-Hoon Lee, Seok-Chun Ryu, and Gyu-Jae Jung, who send e-mails to the conference where Ramsay will be published and to American scholars criticizing Ramsay.
They sent the same email to Americans, arguing that’outsiders are not entitled to discuss’. The third party delivered the message to quit. Reportedly, American scholars who received their e-mails were said to have been’feeling eerie’.
Run by former Seoul National University professor Lee Young-hoon <이승만 TV>Ik-jong Joo, director of the Nakseong University Economic Research Institute, emphasized that Ramsey’s thesis was not a historical paper, but a law and economics paper. “It’s not the original historical paper, but it’s historically flawed. You shouldn’t blame it like this.”
It is an argument to take into account that the thesis is on history, but it is not a thesis of a historian. It is not to say that if the conditions for writing a historical paper, where fact-related analysis is the most important, should not have been written such a sensitive paper from the beginning.
As shown in the remarks of Joo Ik-jong, even colonial modernizationists know that Ramsey’s thesis is not sufficient as a historical thesis. Nevertheless, they attack American scholars, saying,’Outsiders are not qualified to discuss.’
However, in the comfort women issue, there can be no outsiders and no third parties. Just as the 1980 May 18 massacre was not only a problem for Gwangju citizens and Chun Doo-hwan, and the Nazi massacre was not only a problem for Jews and Hitler, the sexual exploitation of comfort women is not only a problem for comfort women, nor a problem only for North and South Korea and China. There can be no disagreement that this issue is not a problem at the individual level, but at the community level. The fact that the comfort women statue is erected far away in the United States and Europe means that people around the world recognize this as their own problem.
People around the world who deal with this problem are raising their voices from the idea that they should not only sympathize with the pain of the victims, but also for the safety of themselves and their families. Had this been regarded as someone else’s work, he would not have contributed to the establishment of a girl statue in his village, even despite the interference of the Japanese government and businesses.
Sending an e-mail to Americans who criticize Ramsay, saying, “The third party should fall,” can be said to be the result of a poor understanding of the nature of the matter. It shows that the sexual exploitation of comfort women is a threat to the safety and peace of the human community.
Prof. Ramsayer, who is confined to his Japanese experience and academic world, and has published a ridiculous or enormous dissertation without grasping the nature of the comfort women issue, is a problem, but colonial modernists who overlooked that this issue was a whole human issue and defended Ramsayer. It is also a problem. From Ramsay and their appearances, I can’t help but think of the word’mangbal’.