Harvard Professor Continues to Advocate for Comfort Women Views in New Book

Professor Ramseyer and his views on the comfort women are back in the news:

A Harvard professor has claimed that Japan did not force Korean and other women into sexual slavery during World War II, renewing his much-denounced claims that the victims were actually prostitutes.

J. Mark Ramseyer of the Harvard Law School made the claim in the preface to a recently published book on the victims, saying Japan’s military did not need to forcibly mobilize what he characterized as prostitutes and had little room to do so.

Authored by Tetsuo Arima, a social science professor at Waseda University, the book was published on July 30 ahead of South Korea’s Aug. 15 Liberation Day that marks the country’s liberation from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule, long a source of historical animosity between the neighboring countries.

In the Japanese-language preface, Ramseyer also said that it was only after Seiji Yoshida, a Japanese novelist, published a book entitled “My War Crimes” in 1983 that damage claims by former sex slaves started to emerge.

The book included Yoshida’s claim that he took Korean women from the island of Jeju for sexual service.

Ramseyer then claimed that women, who worked at the military brothels to make money or due to pressure exerted by their fathers, started to claim that they were forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese military.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but like I have long said, the comfort women controversy is one of these issues where facts do not matter, how people feel about the topic is what matters.

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.