Professor Ramseyer Likely to Revise Paper Distorting Korean Massacre During Kanto Earthquake

[Asia Economy Reporter Park Byung-hee] Mark Ramseyer, a professor at Harvard Law School in the United States who labeled Japanese military comfort women victims as 'prostitutes,' is reportedly planning to revise his paper that distorted the massacre of Koreans during the Kanto (Kant?) Great Earthquake.

Ramseyer's paper, titled "Vigilantes: Japanese Police, the Massacre of Koreans, and Private Security Firms," published in June 2019, is scheduled to be included in an academic journal (Handbook) on the theme of "Privatization," to be published by the University of Cambridge in the UK this August. Alon Harel, a professor at the Hebrew University of Israel Law School and co-editor-in-chief of the journal, recently acknowledged in an email interview with Yonhap News Agency that Ramseyer's paper was a "very regrettable mistake."

Professor Harel stated that Ramseyer deleted the paper from the preprint site SSRN and that the Handbook to be printed six months later "will not include the original text as is."

The editorial team provided Ramseyer with very specific and critical comments, and Ramseyer expressed his intention to "significantly" revise the paper accordingly, Harel introduced.

The requested revisions include claims that Koreans exhibited violent tendencies during the Kanto Great Earthquake, and Ramseyer reportedly explained that "much of it is merely rumors heard from Japanese sources."

Professor Harel admitted that he was not well-versed in the history of Japan's occupation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945 and confessed, "I assumed that Professor Ramseyer knew more history than we did."

He added that after learning in detail what actually happened in the Korean Peninsula during the Japanese colonial period, "immediate measures were taken to restore the damage."

The problematic paper included claims that although Koreans lost their lives to Japanese vigilantes during the 1923 Kanto Great Earthquake, the Japanese response was justified because Koreans committed crimes such as arson.

Ramseyer presented demographic statistics showing that the male ratio among Koreans in Japan was much higher, with many young men, and used the general theory that "young men have higher crime rates demographically anywhere in the world" to bizarrely consider the entire Korean population in Japan as a criminal group.