The following is from an article by Professor Yoshitaka Fukui of Aoyama Gakuin University that appeared in today's Sankei Shimbun Opinion section.
It is a must-read not only for the people of Japan but also for people around the world.
Emphasis in the text other than the headline is mine.
The Comfort Women Issue: Mr. Ramseyer's Accusation
The West Continues to Believe Lies
The claim that Korean comfort women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military before World War II became widely believed in Japan for a time after the Asahi Shimbun newspaper was led by the utter fabrication of a man of some repute named Seiji Yoshida.
Soon, however, the contradictory lies were exposed, and in 2014, the Asahi Shimbun, which had taken the bait, retracted all of its articles based on Yoshida's "testimony.
In Japan, it is now a well-known fact that the theory of forced deportation of comfort women and the theory that "comfort women = sex slaves'' are fiction.
However, the trouble is that among Japanese researchers in the West, the "comfort women = sex slaves" theory is still the "consensus" that cannot be criticized.
The Western media continues to believe it.
Several years ago, Mark Ramseyer, a Harvard University professor and a leading authority on corporate law in the U.S., cast a stone at this false consensus.
Having spent his younger days in Japan and fluent in Japanese, he wrote an academic paper that theoretically and empirically showed that the comfort women system was an extension of the domestic prostitution industry, which at the time was a legitimate business and recognized under regulations.
The paper was submitted to the International Review of Law and Economics and accepted in November 2008.
It was published on the journal's website in December.
However, when the summary appeared on the Sankei Shimbun website and in print in January 2009, a chorus of condemnation of Ramseyer erupted, first in South Korea and then in the United States, where a massive anti-Ramseyer campaign led by Japanese researchers demanded the withdrawal of the paper.
In the end, the paper was not retracted, but in Japan, even the Asahi Shimbun newspaper was forced to admit it was a lie.
Why is the fabricated story about comfort women still accepted in the West?
Even in South Korea, courageous researchers have been making claims based on facts to deny the theory of forced marriage, and these claims are gradually gaining traction.
Why, then, is this still the case in the West?
It is a question that many Japanese would be very curious about.
A Shocking Book Published in the U.S.
The Comfort Women Hoax" (Encounter Hoax), a book that answers this question, will be published in the United States this month.
The book is co-authored by Ramseyer and Jason Morgan, an associate professor at Reitaku University who has criticized the sexual slavery theory since he was a graduate student expelled from the U.S. history community.
The book is also an indictment of both men, who were subjected to tangible and intangible pressures from the U.S. academic community and almost forced to suppress their statements.
I want to introduce its contents and discuss the significance of its publication.
First, it is an essential book for all those pursuing academic freedom and freedom of expression.
In Western academic circles, the comfort women issue is a minor issue that has not been widely studied. Still, because of this, the theory that some Japanese scholars believe "comfort women are sex slaves" has become the consensus and established as "politically correct.
In Western academic circles, the comfort women issue is a minor issue that has not been widely studied, but that is why the "comfort women = sex slaves" theory of some Japanese researchers has become the consensus and established as "political correctness."
It is why Mr. Ramseyer's attempt to overturn this theory was intensely attacked before the facts were even disputed.
In the U.S., the "cancellation culture," which seeks to socially erase speech that is not limited to the comfort women issue but also goes against the poly-correctness, is raging, and the attack on Mr. Ramseyer is one example of this.
Similar examples are too numerous to list.
When James Sweet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and president of the American Historical Association, criticized the New York Times-led "1619 Project" movement, which claims that U.S. history began with the arrival of slaves in 1619, for its simplistic view of history as "black good, white bad," he was immediately denounced and forced to apologize. Once a target of the cancellation
Once a person becomes the target of a cancellation, they are indeed left alone.
Even those who thought they were friends turned to the attackers.
However, Mr. Ramseyer did not give in and was adamant that he would withdraw.
At American universities, there is a widespread trend in which even fact-based criticisms of leading academic researchers are attacked unreasonably beyond the right and wrong assertions.
People are increasingly avoiding academic fields related to the humanities and social sciences.
Ramseyer and his colleagues are deeply concerned about this.
The culprit is, after all, the Japanese.
Another point Ramseyer and his colleagues make is that Japanese people should be concerned about the lack of Japanese studies on the comfort women issue in the West.
The Japanese scholars abroad who argue that "comfort women = sex slaves" do not generally have a high level of Japanese language reading comprehension or historical fact-finding ability, at least not to the level of Ramseyer and his colleagues, who make full use of prewar Japanese documents.
The papers by researchers of the "comfort women = sexual slavery" theory are often accompanied by citations to other English-language documents that share the same opinion.
Ramseyer and his colleagues criticize this as a "message game."
Moreover, they say that the only sources that end up being cited are Seiji Yoshida's fabricated books or the "testimonies" of some comfort women, which have changed many times and do not add up at the fundamental level.
The Western researchers are Yoon Mee-hyang, former head of the Solidarity for Justice and Memory to Solve the Problem of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery (Justice Federation, formerly Para-Taiko), which has been criticized for using comfort women in South Korea, and who was pointed out to have ties to North Korea, including participation in rallies by the North Korean-affiliated Chongryon, the fact that she embezzled funds for comfort women (Convicted by the High Court) is also not mentioned at all.
However, this is partly because Japanese academics and media have been intentionally spreading a false image of comfort women for many years.
Unfortunately, this practice continues to this day.
When Ramseyer was under attack over his Comfort Women article, the retraction advocates relied on a Japanese researcher, Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a professor emeritus at Chuo University, who himself submitted an article to the journal calling for the retraction of Ramseyer's article.
However, in an interview with the Mainichi Shimbun in 2019 (evening edition dated September 13), he said about the comfort women, "(1) A company selected by the military sent women to comfort stations in exchange for lending money (advanced debt) to the women's relatives. "Human trafficking,'' where a person is taken for work by a businessman. 2) "kidnapping,'' where a businessman takes a person by tricking the person into working as a bar attendant or a nurse, and 3) "Snapping,'' where a person is forcibly taken away by authorities or a businessman using threats or violence. He stated there are three types, but "on the Korean peninsula, which is a colony, cases ① and ② are common.''
In other words, Yoshimi's view of the reality of Korean comfort women overlaps with that of Ramseyer, who views it as a prostitution business (Ramseyer does not mention comfort women outside of Japan and Korea as outside the scope of his research).
Yet he called for the Ramseyer paper to be retracted. (Oddly enough, this interview is inaccessible in the Mainichi Shimbun's database "Maisaku").
Even now, scholars and media who cling to the "comfort women = sex slaves" theory behind their apparent sympathy for comfort women refuse to acknowledge their subjectivity and use them as a tool for political campaigns.
On the other hand, Mr. Ramseyer is not in line with the "should theory" or political movements but discusses the facts and analyzes the behavior of comfort women who chose prostitution as a way of survival under the harsh conditions of the time, treating them as human beings who think and act on their own.
Which of the two has more respect for the comfort women?
We hope that Ramseyer and his colleagues' new book will stimulate fact-based discussions in Europe and the United States.
2024/1/17 in Kyoto
