They said that it was voluntary prostitution for comfort women… “Ramsey, I couldn’t find the contract.”

[사진 출처 = 연합뉴스]

picture explanation[사진 출처 = 연합뉴스]

It was argued that John Mark Ramsey, a 67-year-old professor at Harvard University Law School in the United States, who published a dissertation stating that “comfort women in the wartime Japanese military were voluntary prostitutes,” complained that “we could not find a prostitution contract for Korean comfort women”. He admitted that the core evidence to support his claim did not exist, and criticism against him is expected to increase in the future.

Prof. Ramsayer’s Harvard Law School colleague, Professor Seok Ji-young, contributed an article titled “Finding the Truth of Comfort Women” in the American magazine New Yorker on the 26th. In this article, Prof. Seok reviewed Ramsay’s thesis and said, “We could not find any sources that indicate that Korean women had signed (prostitution) contracts, whether oral or written.” When Harvard Professor Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert traced the footnotes cited in Professor Ramsey’s thesis, there was no way to confirm the facts. Professor Seok wrote, “We could not confirm the contracts of Korean comfort women related to the comfort stations cited in the thesis. There was no secondary source detailing these contracts, nor could we confirm the third explanation to confirm the related contents.”

When Professor Seok directly asked Professor Ramsey, he said, “I thought it would be cool if I found the contracts for Korean comfort women,” and said, “But I couldn’t find it. You certainly couldn’t find it.” do. Also, while Professor Ramsey cited a Japanese book in his thesis, he claimed that a 10-year-old Japanese girl had voluntarily signed a prostitution contract, but other parts of the book also testified that the girl was deceived and came as a prostitute.

When fellow professors criticized him for being unable to assert that he had signed a prostitution contract on the basis of this, Professor Ramsey said he was “embarrassed and distressed.” “I don’t know how this happened,” Professor Seok wrote.

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