Academic attacked on ‘comfort women’ claim
Backlash against Harvard professor’s views on wartime sex slaves increases
Thousands of academics and rights advocates have joined a group of Harvard Law School students in denouncing a professor at the elite college who claims Japanese forces did not take sex slaves in nations they occupied in World War II.
Mark Ramseyer, Mitsubishi professor of Japanese legal studies at Harvard University, claimed that so-called comfort women voluntarily contracted themselves into sexual servitude during the war in an article titled “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War”.
The article was published online in December by the International Review of Law and Economics, an academic journal. It appears in the March issue of the journal.
Ramseyer also expressed the same view in an op-ed article published on Jan 12 in Japan Forward, an English-language website of Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese nationalist, conservative newspaper.
In response to Ramseyer’s articles, the group of students at Harvard Law School wrote in an open letter: “The author is using economics — more specifically game theory and law and economics — as a cover to legitimize horrific atrocities.”
They also called on Ramseyer’s fellow academics and the public to “condemn the article and also call for its retraction”.
The petition letter has garnered nearly 2,900 signatures so far, including more than 1,600 econoReview mists from the US, China, South Korea, Australia and other countries.
Al Roth and Paul Milgrom, economics professors at Stanford University, said in a statement that the article is “distressing in so many ways” and they “can’t help being reminded of Holocaust denial”.
“The soundness of an historical account should be judged based on a review of the evidence, which can never be overruled by some simple game theory model. The appeal Professor Ramseyer makes to game theory provides no support for his claims,” the two professors said.
What is most controversial about Ramseyer’s article is a passage about a 10-year old Japanese girl named Osaki.
“When Osaki turned 10, a recruiter stopped by and offered her 300 yen upfront if she would agree to go abroad. The recruiter did not try to trick her; even at age 10, she knew what the job entailed,” the article says.
Not just fact vs fiction
The passage on Osaki is “a blatant endorsement of child sex trafficking”, Pinelopi Goldberg, a professor of economics at Yale University, said in a statement.
“The issue here is not just about fact versus fiction or academic freedom. It is about justifying acts (i.e., child rape and human trafficking) that are not only morally repugnant, but also strictly illegal in civilized society,” she said.
Ramseyer declined China Daily’s request for comment, saying he’s not “doing interviews”.
Amid the growing protest from academics, the International of Law and Economics has issued an “expression of concern” to inform readers of the issues raised to Ramseyer’s article and said an investigation into the article’s historical evidence is underway.
The article also has drawn backlash from Chinese and Korean communities in the US. Several rallies have been organized across the country to denounce the Harvard professor.
On Monday, dozens of representatives from Korean-American and Chinese-American groups gathered around “comfort women” statues in St Mary’s Park in San Francisco to protest against Ramseyer. The activists also are calling for a boycott of Mitsubishi products. An online petition in support of a boycott received more than 1,000 signatures within 12 hours.
“What Professor Ramseyer said was a lie. But this lie has very dangerous implications. It legitimizes sex trafficking and sexual violence against women,” said Julie Tang, co-chair of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition, at the rally.
“It feeds into the misogynistic notion that women join in on rapes by implied or explicit consent. We cannot allow this kind of voodoo theories about the ‘comfort women’ victims to spread. We must debunk it.”
Lillian Sing, co-chair of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition, said: “It is really a shame, a real travesty that a law professor at one of the world’s most prestigious institutions, Harvard Law School, could author an article that is factually inaccurate, at odds with overwhelming historical evidence, and worse off, an article that perpetuates sexual violence, sexism, an attack on women and promotes a rape culture that blames the rape victim.”