Japanese Right-Wing to Award Harvard Professor Who Claimed 'Comfort Women Were Prostitutes'

A Japanese right-wing think tank is awarding a prize to a Harvard University professor in the United States who distorted the truth by calling Japanese military comfort women "voluntary prostitutes" and denying their reality.

According to the right-wing Sankei Shimbun on the 10th, the Public Interest Incorporated Foundation National Foundation Issues Research Institute (Kokki-ken) selected Mark Ramseyer, a professor at Harvard Law School, as the recipient of this year's "Japan Research Award." Kokki-ken is a right-wing think tank chaired by Yoshiko Sakurai, a right-wing commentator and close aide to former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and has been awarding the Japan Research Award annually since its establishment in 2014.

This year's grand prize for the Japan Research Award selected by Kokki-ken is Ramseyer's 2023 book titled "Harvard's Ramseyer Completely Refutes the Comfort Women Sex Slave Theory." The book is based on the same argument as Ramseyer's controversial 2021 paper, in which he claimed that the Japanese military comfort women were prostitutes rather than sex slaves or victims of war crimes. His paper, published in the International Review of Law and Economics (IRLE), faced significant criticism even within the American historical academic community.

In his acceptance speech posted in advance on the Kokki-ken website, Professor Ramseyer repeated his previous claim that "(comfort women) were neither forcibly taken nor sex slaves." He also expressed gratitude to everyone who "stood by me saying 'You just told the truth, so you should not apologize'" after the 2021 paper was published.

In an interview with Sankei Shimbun, he also stated that to change the Western perception that comfort women were sex slaves, "researchers must write in English," and expressed his intention to continue publishing research maintaining his existing claims. The award ceremony will be held in Tokyo on the 11th.

Kokki-ken's Japan Research Award has previously been given to openly pro-Japanese scholars even within Korea. In 2022, Lee Dae-geun, Professor Emeritus at Sungkyunkwan University, received a special award for his research on property acquired during colonial rule. In 2021, Lee Woo-yeon, a member of the Naksungdae Institute of Economic Research and co-author of the book "Anti-Japan Tribalism," was selected for a special award for translating into Korean the book by Japanese right-wing commentator Tsutomu Nishioka titled "Fabricated: The Forced Labor Issue Without Forced Laborers." Choi Gil-seong, a professor at Dong-A University in Japan who naturalized as a Japanese citizen in 1999, also received this award in 2018.