Korean Students Attempt to Cancel Harvard Professor Who Claims that Comfort Women Were Contracted Prostitutes
The comfort women controversy is one of these issues where facts do not matter, how people feel about the topic is what matters:
Korean students at Harvard University have strongly criticized a professor over his controversial claim that Japan’s wartime sexual slavery was actually voluntary prostitution, demanding its immediate withdrawal and his official apology to victims.
Harvard Korean Society made the demand in a statement on its website after Harvard Law School Japanese legal studies professor J. Mark Ramseyer caused controversy with his recently published paper titled “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War.”
“It is a wrong conclusion based on grounds very biased and lacking trustworthiness,” the statement said. “Harvard Korean Society demands Prof. Ramseyer’s official apology and immediate withdrawal of the paper.”
“The issue of comfort women is an international inhumane act, and his academic view which justifies and negates the act is an immoral and shameless view,” it added.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
I have not read Professor Ramseyer’s paper yet because it is behind a pay wall. Maybe it is out of line, but I would not be surprised if it has similar conclusions to what Sejong University Professor Park Yu-ha wrote a few years ago about the comfort women issue:
“Park believes that Japan did not recruit comfort women in Korea, which was part of Japan from Tokyo’s perspective, in quite the same way that it did on the front lines and in occupied areas, such as in the Philippines. In those areas, records show that Japanese soldiers were directly involved in the forcible and violent taking away of comfort women. ‘Many of the Korean comfort women were apparently recruited while being cheated by agents of prostitution, some of whom were Koreans, or being sold by their parents,’ Park said. ‘While some have testified they were forcibly taken away by military personnel, I suppose that such cases, if there were any, were exceptional.’
She was of course arrested for writing such a book. The Korean public likes to think that all the comfort women were girls sleeping in bed and kidnapped by evil Japanese soldiers while the Japanese rightists like to think they were all willing prostitutes. Both historical narratives are untrue if one really looks at the history.
What Professor Park writes about is the same historical narrative that Sarah Soh wrote about in her book “The Comfort Women“. In the book Soh provides documented evidence that most of the Korean women put into the comfort women system were sold by Korean brokers. The actual kidnapping of Korean women by Japanese soldiers would be a very rare occurrence when the broker system made so many of these women readily available. This does not absolve the Imperial Japanese from responsibility since they ran the comfort woman system that provided the demand for the Korean brokers to meet. To make even worse is that many of these girls were teenagers when sold into prostitution. I see no way that a young teenager should be considered a willing prostitute. Especially when many girls were sold by their families into prostitution for money due to the extreme poverty. This was actually a practice that was going on well into the US military era in South Korea.
It is pretty clear that the comfort women issue is not black and white, but ultimately the Imperial Japanese government was responsible for the actions of the Korean brokers that supplied the majority of the Korean girls that were underage. There is no need to create a false narrative of what happened to the comfort women when the truth is bad enough.
>I have not read Professor Ramseyer’s paper yet because it is behind a pay wall.”
Then maybe you should hold your opinion until you read his paper? You can read his work here:
law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/Ramseyer_995.pdf
>but ultimately the Imperial Japanese government was responsible
Ramseyer would disagree. His opinion is that the women were strictly volunteer prostitutes and that the Japanese government was NOT responsible.
> I would not be surprised if it has similar conclusions to what Sejong University Professor Park Yu-ha
Nope. At least Park acknowledged that Japan recruited these women. Ramseyer denies that there was even a system that Japan recruited these women. Ramseyer also goes further and describes Korean people’s resistance in the March 1 independence movement protest as a violent rebellion.
Ramseyer is also financially funded by the government of Japan, and he was given a medal of Rising Sun in 2018 for promoting Japan positively. He exists because of Japan funding. So we all know, he’s not exactly ‘unbiased’. On the other hand, Park Yu-ha never got a dime from Japan.
Speaking of unbiased, I notice that right-wing Americans usually are solid supporters of the Imperial Japan of the 1940’s – not because they agree with Japan whitewashing their war time history (after all, Japanese also enslaved American POWs and were extremely cruel) – but because right-wing Japan under Shinzo Abe serves America’s national interests the most. It’s a perfect example of how the enemy of my enemy is my friend. LOL.
In regards to the comfort women issue, I think the truth is somewhere in between.
And IMHO, what Professor Park wrote seems to be closer to the truth and sounds plausible.
Of course, considering that the Korean left has a constant need to beat up on the Japanese and the comfort women and the laborers provide very good propaganda ammunition for that, it will not be in their best interest to uncover the truth.
The time has come for Korea and the especially the Korean left to put aside all this and move on. There are bigger problems in this country that needs solving.
As for compensation money, Japan did provide compensation based on the calculations provided by Park Chung-hee 55 years ago and we all know he used that money to invest in such ventures such as POSCO and the Seoul-Busan highway.
So when it comes to compensation, since the Korean government received the compensation money and decided to invest and thanks to the investment, the money has grown. maybe they should take the lead and hand out the dividends to the comfort women and the laborers?
I want to address GIKorea’s comment on the old days of the 8th U.S. Imperial Army that used to allow GI towns to operate within walking distance of the front gates of ALL of the USFK facilities. I can corroborate the fact that Koreans had a history of selling their daughters. They sold them to brokers who sold them to the club owners who sometimes sold them to unsuspecting GI’s.
In my case, my first yobo was a girl that I “rescued” out of a club in Anjongni in late 1983 (paid $350 to get the club to release her). That’s when I found out the old saying of, “You can take a ho out of the club but you can’t take the club out of the ho.” It wasn’t long before she was tired of taking care of me and ran off to her province. It didn’t really bother me except that I was out $350 and I’d only gotten about 4 good months out of her.
What happened next shocked the hell out of me. Apparently the girl decided to go home and her father was livid. He showed up at my hootch door apologizing to me saying that he was embarrassed by her actions. I told him to forget about it. He left but returned about 30 minutes later. This time he had another of his daughters with him. She looked like she was about 16 maybe. I humbly refused and finally convinced him to leave. That was freaky-deaky! Just shows you how poor the average Korean was in the mid 1980s.
P.S. I saw the girls I took in as a yobo a few years later. She was married to an MP and looked like she got smacked around a lot. Felt sorry for her and bought her a beer where she was working (yes, the MP had her working in the bar again,, what a moron!)
I have never commented on this but…
Forty years from now, the debate in the Philippines will center around issues such as:
– Why did evil Koreans take our comfort women to enslave into prostitution? (Because they could… there was an easy supply of willing girls and ready customers)
– Did the Korean government know what was happening? Did they promote it? (Obviously yes and yes)
– Was the American military aware of how the system worked? (Leadership pretended not to know. Most grunts didn’t care to know, didn’t really understand, or saw nothing wrong with any system allowed by leadership)
– How did our innocent comfort women get tricked into this? (A few got tricked. The Bamboo Telegraph kept most informed. Extreme poverty is a strong motivator)
(Will 2060 Korea be quick to apologize to the Philippines and send them a bag of money or understand if Philippine courts seize Korean assets? Yeah. No.)
Anyway, this is a simplification of very complex interactions, motivations, and desires on all sides… and there aren’t any real innocents, including the Filipinas.
It is likely the Korean/Japanese comfort woman model was not too different… after all, Korean families were selling Korean girls to Korean loansharks to sell to Korean entertainment facility owners to use as prostitutes as recently as 15 years ago (last case I personally know of)).
And this business model is hardly rare. It was written (and complained) about during the Roman empire. They even had the exact same juicy girl racket.
In the end, everybody is tired of hearing about this. It has never been about justice for comfort women or the Korean government would take care of them as a first priority and then chase the Japanese for reimbursement.
Its just an issue that gets brought up every time a real issue starts getting noticed that nobody in charge wants noticed.
Currently, everyone should be focused on why Korea is destroying its important nighttime economy, forfeiting the massive tax income, and giving out meager subsidies that total a large wasteful expense… all over a disease that killed fewer Koreans than cars killed Korean pedestrians in 2020… with 83.66% of deaths over 70 years old and 95.55% being over 60… and only .44% being 30-39, all with other health issues. Cigarettes are a FAR bigger killer.
If you really care about comfort women, set them up in comfort for the few years they have left and then get to work fixing the broken economy that is being further broken by ignorance or design.
“If you really care about comfort women, set them up in comfort for the few years they have left and then get to work fixing the broken economy that is being further broken by ignorance or design.”
The Church of Perpetual Outrage Versus Everyone Except Mass-Murdering Communists has no intention of giving those poor women a peaceful or comfortable life as long as they can shove them in front of a camera and raise funds for pro-Socialist election campaigns.
Comfort women abused by the Japanese and raped repeatedly by the Korean leftist.