U.S. Scholar Ramseyer, Who Claimed "Comfort Women Are Prostitutes," Says He Will "Write Another Paper"

“It's Good That the Journal Did Not Retract the Paper”
“The West Does Not Know the Truth About Comfort Women,” Claims

Mark Ramseyer, a professor at Harvard University in the United States who caused a stir in academia by publishing a paper claiming that comfort women during the Japanese colonial period were "voluntary prostitutes, not sex slaves," stated that he has no intention of retracting the paper and plans to continue writing on the subject.

On the 12th, the Japanese right-wing media outlet Sankei Shimbun reported on an interview conducted following the International Review of Law and Economics (IRLE) journal's refusal to retract Ramseyer's comfort women research paper. Sankei had introduced Ramseyer's paper two years ago.

In the controversial paper titled "Contracts and Coercion: Sexual Exploitation in the Pacific War," Ramseyer argued that "Korean comfort women were licensed prostitutes and not sex slaves forcibly taken to Japan," which drew severe criticism for distorting the facts.

However, Elsevier, the Dutch publisher of IRLE, introduced the verification process of Ramseyer's paper "Contracts and Coercion: Sexual Exploitation in the Pacific War" through the final manuscript before the January 2023 issue was published and ultimately rejected the retraction request.

Regarding academic criticism of the paper, which contains content justifying the recruitment of Japanese military comfort women, IRLE stated that it requested a re-examination by six historians. Of these, four historians who accepted the re-examination request pointed out that "Ramseyer's paper failed to present evidence that overturns the existing consensus in the historical community," excluding two historians who declined the request.

Nevertheless, IRLE did not accept the retraction demand. According to the journal's ethical code and Elsevier's own regulations, a paper can only be retracted if unethical conduct such as data manipulation is found, which was not the case here. However, due to concerns about reliability, the journal decided to maintain an "Expression Of Concern" stance.

Mark Ramseyer, Professor at Harvard University, USA [Image source: Provided by Yonhap News TV]

In response, Professor Ramseyer said in the interview, "I receive dozens of protest emails every day," and added, "I think it is good that IRLE did not retract the paper."

He also claimed, "Most Japanese researchers in the U.S. and Europe know nothing about the comfort women system," and argued, "My claim embarrasses the left-wing, not all Koreans."

Ramseyer cited Seiji Yoshida's 1983 book "My War Crime" as an example demonstrating the falsity of the coercion of comfort women. He self-praised, saying, "The truth of the comfort women issue, created by Yoshida's fraudulent testimony, has now been recorded in English literature through my paper."

In "My War Crime," Seiji testified that under orders from the Japanese military, he led military units to forcibly recruit about 200 women from villages on Jeju Island and elsewhere as comfort women. Regarding this, the Japanese government declared in 2021 that the term "comfort women" should be used instead of "military comfort women," claiming Yoshida made false statements.

Ramseyer repeated his previous claim that various documents and victim testimonies proving the coercion of comfort women are ignored, and that the calls for retraction of his paper were led by young scholars with leftist perspectives.

He said, "Academic freedom is an important issue in the U.S., and it is common sense for scholars to freely express various opinions," adding, "Currently, scholars in their 30s and 40s tend to problematize and ostracize opinions they find undesirable."

He further added, "Most humanities professors at American universities are left-wing and so extreme that students do not gather."

Professor Ramseyer is a professor of Japanese law at the Ross School of Law at Bird University and has received a decoration from the Japanese government for his contributions to promoting Japanese studies and culture.