ダデンやA・ゴードン、ムンらがラムザイヤー論文に反論

ハーバード大の学生新聞で良いのかな？

学生新聞によると、アレクシス・ダデンやアンドルー・ゴードンがラムザイヤー教授に噛みついた。

 Harvard Professor’s Paper Claiming ‘Comfort Women’ in Imperial Japan Were Voluntarily Employed Stokes International Controversy

By Ariel H. Kim and Simon J. Levien, Crimson Staff Writers

SEOUL, South Korea — A paper by Harvard Law School Japanese legal studies professor J. Mark Ramseyer that claims sex slaves taken by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II were actually recruited, contracted sex workers generated international controversy, academic criticism, and student petitions at Harvard this week.

The paper, “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” made headlines across South Korean media and was met with widespread public anger. Ramseyer’s work is set to be published in the March issue of the International Review of Law and Economics. Korean outlets picked up the news after Ramseyer’s paper was featured in a Jan. 28 press release in Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper.

Well-known worldwide for its conservative, nationalist bent, Sankei shared Ramseyer’s abstract with his permission, while adding that memorials to “comfort women” across Asia have spread a “false image” of Japan.

“Comfort women” — a loose translation of a Japanese euphemism for “prostitute” — refers to women and girls forced into sex slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army. Comfort women were held at brothels, or “comfort stations,” adjacent to Japanese military facilities to serve soldiers. The number of women enslaved from Japan’s occupied territories is disputed, but estimates range from the tens of thousands to up to 410,000, with many being of Korean descent.

Since World War II, Japan has propped up and dissolved compensation funds, dealt with lawsuits and investigations, and issued and walked back apologies to comfort women. Of the few surviving comfort women today, many have said they are still waiting for justice.

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International, and many notable scholars in Korea, Japan, the United States, and other countries have published extensive reports documenting the explicit sexual slavery of comfort women.

Ramseyer argues in his paper that comfort women were not coerced, but voluntarily employed under the terms of a contract.

Based on the title of Ramseyer’s professorship — the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies — many Korean media outlets and scholars suspected that he may be sponsored by the Japanese corporation.

Yuji Hosaka — a political science professor at Sejong University in Seoul often cited in Korean press — suggested in an interview the possibility that Mitsubishi donated money to the University to establish the professorship and give Ramseyer this role.

In an interview with The Crimson Friday, Ramseyer said he is not aware of the precise origin of the endowed professorship, but believes that Mitsubishi Group made an approximately $1.5 million donation to Harvard in the 1970s to back the position. He said, however, that there are “no strings” or money from Mitsubishi attached to his professorship today.

Spokespeople for the University and the Law School did not respond to a request for comment.

Hosaka also said he suspected Ramseyer’s work was influenced by his connections with the Japanese government. Ramseyer, who was raised in Japan, was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun in 2018, a Japanese government distinction for those who promote Japanese culture abroad.

Ramseyer acknowledged that he has friends who work for the Japanese government, but “absolutely” denied that those connections or the award had any influence on the paper.

Academics Question Paper’s Reasoning and Sources

Legal scholars and historians from South Korea and the United States said Ramseyer’s paper had several flaws in its reasoning and raised questions about the sources he used to back up those arguments.

Harvard Professor of Korean History Carter J. Eckert ’68 wrote in an emailed statement that Ramseyer’s article is “woefully deficient, empirically, historically, and morally.”

Eckert added that he and fellow Harvard History professor Andrew Gordon ’74 are preparing a critical response to Ramseyer’s article at the request of the journal.

University of Connecticut professor of Japanese and Korean history Alexis Dudden — who said she took a class taught by Ramseyer at the University of Chicago in the 1990s — said she was “shocked” when Ramseyer emailed her the article in December.

“It is a poorly resourced, evidentially fatuous piece of scholarly production,” she said. “It is conceptually misguided, because he’s not understanding not only the context, but what actually happened.”

Dudden said after reading the article, she wrote to Ramseyer, responding to inaccuracies she noticed in his logic.

Among the first things she noticed, she said, was that Ramseyer omitted “an intense body of scholarly archival Government of Japan evidence.”

Pyong Gap Min — a sociology professor at Queens College, City University of New York who has researched comfort women — said that Ramseyer based his claims solely off of Japanese “neo-national arguments.”

“He has the burden to refute previous studies that have demonstrated the comfort women system as sexual slavery,” he said.

Ramseyer said an early version of his paper included “disputes with historians,” but those sections were cut from the final version at the request of the journal in order to focus the article on the contracts.

The journal’s editors did not respond to a request for comment Saturday.

Several scholars also said they took issue with two of Ramseyer’s main arguments in the article.

The first is his claim that recruiters and brothel operators, rather than the Japanese government or military, were responsible for forcing women to work at the comfort stations.

“Ramseyer made the error of completely ignoring the fact that these recruiters were working under Japanese military or government orders,” Hosaka said in an interview conducted in Korean.

Japanese government documents provide evidence that the Japanese military secretly selected independent recruiters and forced them to operate comfort stations, Hosaka added.

Professor Seo Kyoung-duk, who teaches at Sungshin Women’s University in Seoul, said he agreed with Hosaka, citing a 1938 Japanese ministry notice on recruiting women to comfort stations.

Responding to the evidence that Hosaka, Seo, and other scholars have cited in their research, Ramseyer said the notion that there are documents confirming Japanese government involvement is “just wrong.”

“I don’t see anything that indicates that the Japanese government dragooned people into doing it,” he said.

Asked why he did not cite any Korean sources in the paper, Ramseyer said he is “very upfront” about the fact that he does not read Korean.

Several academics also disputed another one of Ramseyer’s claims in the paper: that comfort women willingly entered brothel contracts, from which they financially benefited, and after which they were able to return home.

“The comfort women system that the army was using is essentially an extension of the licensed prostitution system that was in effect in Japan,” Ramseyer said in the interview.

Hosaka argued, however, that the “comfort stations” that accompanied the Japanese military during WWII and the licensed brothels in Japan are entirely different.

Harvard Law School professor Noah R. Feldman ’92, who has studied comfort women and contract theory, also said Ramseyer’s claim is incorrect.

“The economic relationship that was deployed, even according to Ramseyer’s own research, is very close to what we would ordinarily call debt slavery,” Feldman said, comparing it to sharecropping contracts in the Jim Crow American South. “Such arrangements are designed to and do exploit the vast power discrepancy between different actors and institutions.”

Katharine H.S. Moon, a professor of Asian studies and political science at Wellesley College, wrote in an emailed statement that Ramseyer’s claim ignores the context in which women entered into contracts.

“How do we explain whether a 14- or 16-year-old girl knew what she was signing even if she signed it, especially in a Korean society at the time that was not accustomed to contracts and related legalism and didn’t grant such agency to girls and women?” Moon wrote.

Students React with Anger, Petitions

The Korean Association of Harvard Law School, led by law students Gabrielle J. Kim and Kikyung “Kik” Lee, released a statement Thursday condemning Ramseyer’s article as “factually inaccurate and misleading.” As of Saturday morning, the statement garnered more than 800 signatures, many from law students across the U.S.

The Harvard College Korean International Students Association also sent a press release to Korean newspapers Friday morning criticizing Ramseyer’s paper and laying out actions the organization plans to take in protest.

KISA also plans to send out a petition to Harvard affiliates, according to Yumi Lee ’21, one of its co-presidents.

Lee said the petition will contain a list of demands to Ramseyer, University administrators, and the academic journal publishing Ramseyer’s article. It will request that Ramseyer apologize “to comfort women for whom his claims may have reinforced painful trauma” and “to the Harvard University community for injuring the institution’s reputation and standards for academic soundness,” she said.

Lee also said KISA will demand that University President Lawrence S. Bacow and Law School Dean John F. Manning ’85 condemn Ramseyer’s research, and that the journal apologize for not upholding a rigorous peer review process and withdraw the article from its upcoming issue.

In a separate email to members Friday, KISA wrote that the Korean Consulate General in Boston is “aware of the situation” and may use KISA’s statement in an official communication. The consulate did not respond to a request for comment Friday.

Several Harvard undergraduates said they reacted with disbelief and disappointment when they first encountered news of the article in South Korean media.

“It was all over the news,” Alyssa Suh ’25, who currently resides in Seoul, said. “I was extremely angry and upset when I first saw that. We were colonized, and they don’t acknowledge that.”

“No one really knows about this piece of history in the States. The amount of Korean history that we learn is literally a paragraph,” Suh added.

Ike Jin Park ’20-’22 said if the history surrounding comfort women was more well-known in the U.S., there would be a greater outcry from students.

“As a Korean citizen myself, I was very uncomfortable,” Park said. “Imagine this was another issue that a lot of people in the West cared about. It simply wouldn’t be okay.”

Park also said he believes the University “needs to make a statement” and that he would like to see the paper taken down.

Esther E. Kim ’23 said she believes the article will damage Harvard’s reputation among Koreans.

“Especially because there is a lot of respect afforded to institutions like Harvard by the Korean community, by the Korean-American community, it is devastating to see that this could be accepted and published by a Harvard Law School professor,” she said.

Responding to student backlash, Ramseyer said he has a “responsibility to the students at the Law School” and is willing to speak with them about the paper.

Ramseyer also said he does not intend to pursue further research on this topic.

Though many scholars said they disagree with Ramseyer’s claims, several noted Ramseyer is protected by academic freedom to promote his opinions.

“His academic freedom entitles him to express whatever views he wishes without any form of university-based sanction,” Feldman said.

Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen wrote in an emailed statement that she was “proud” that HLS student organizations had released the statement “affirming the need to be historically accurate.”

“They have refrained from petitioning for measures that would impair my colleague’s academic freedom, and I would of course disapprove of any such calls,” she wrote.

“He has every right to his opinions and viewpoint, and we all equally have every right to criticize his reasoning and logic,” Gersen added.

The Harvard Crimson 2021.2.7

ハーバード大ゴードン教授 マグロウヒル教科書支持に名乗り

19名のアメリカの歴史学者が日本国へのヘイトキャンペーンに加担・・・もとい、日本政府がアメリカの教科書の偏向記述に抗議した件について、これを非難する共同声明を発表してから二ヶ月近く。新たに、20人目として名乗りを上げたのは、ハーバード大のアンドリュー・ゴードン教授。彼もマグロウヒル教科書に問題があることは承知している。つまり、日本政府が教科書に注文をつけたのは学問の自由の侵害だと憤って、賛同者として名を連ねる決断をしたのである。

幕末の頃から米国の水兵は

日本人「慰安婦」のお世話になっていた

残りの19名も、殆どは慰安婦について詳しくはないはずである。学問の自由という所に反応したのだろう。アレックシス・ダデンも、学問の自由への挑戦といって同僚を焚きつけたのではないか？日本政府は、誤解されないよう十分注意して行動する必要がある。ゴードン教授は、江戸時代からの日本史に一家言を持つ人物らしいが、幕末の頃からアメリカ軍（水兵）は日本で「慰安婦」の提供を受けている。知らなかったとは言わせません。どうも彼は、慰安婦は非日本人が主体と考えているようだし、日本政府がシステムを作ったというのもたぶん違っていて、秦教授の話によると、軍が公娼を戦地でも公認したというのが正確な所らしい。これを全世界の教科書に載せろと言うなら、「開港慰安婦」についても載せろと言うのが筋というもの。

ハーバード大歴史学科ゴードン教授「慰安婦について、全世界の教科書に記載含せねば」

・日本、米国の教科書修正しようと批判
・歴史学会報声明20人で

アンドリュー・ゴードン ハーバード大歴史学科教授が最近アレクシス・ダデン、コネチカット大歴史学科教授が主導した日本政府の脈それ（彼）にヒール出版社歴史教科書の慰安婦関連内容修正試みを批判する声明に参加した。

これで当初19人だったアメリカ歴史学会報3月号の声明参加者は20人に増えた。 京郷新聞は現在京都大学で研究年を送っているゴードン教授に「なぜ名乗りを上げる（？）ことになったのか」Eメールで理由を尋ねてみた。

ゴードン教授は「いかなる政府も学者に彼らの著述内容に対して干渉してはいけないと考える」として「学問研究の自由に対する声明」と話した。 彼は「それでも、論争の対象になったこの教科書のすべての内容に賛成するという意味ではない」として「私が思うに、慰安婦の数を誇張しており、慰安婦の募集過程もまた、教科書が叙述したより複雑だった」とした。 彼は「だが重要なの、は日本政府がその当時いわゆる慰安婦システムを作り、その全般を掌握したという事実」と強調した。 それと共に「そのシステムは人道主義と朝鮮などから来た女性の自由を侵害した。 この点は、アジアだけでなく日本など全世界のすべての教科書に含まれなければならない」とした。

アメリカ議会が日本総理では初めて安倍晋三に上.下院合同演説機会を与えたのが安倍の歴史観を承認したのではないかという問いに「そうは思わない」と答えた。 彼は「アメリカ議会とオバマ政権は、安倍の歴史観に対して超党派的な憂慮を持っていて、彼が今年の夏従来70周年記念演説で何を言い何を言わないのか心配して見ているだろう」とした。 引き続き「安倍が村山・河野談話より後退した声明を出した場合、彼はアメリカ議会、ホワイトハウス、メディア、知識人、国民から強い批判に直面するだろう」とした。

ゴードン教授はアメリカ大学の日本史教材で広く使われる<日本近代史:徳川時代から現在まで>(2003)の著者で日本の労働、階級歴史を専攻した日本史権威者だ。

京郷新聞 2015.3.29[2]

하버드대 역사학과 고든 교수 “위안부 내용, 전 세계 교과서에 포함돼야”

ㆍ일, 미 교과서 수정 시도 비판
ㆍ역사학회보 성명 20명으로

앤드루 고든 하버드대 역사학과 교수(사진)가 최근 알렉시스 더든 코네티컷대 역사학과 교수가 주도한 일본 정부의 맥그로힐 출판사 역사교과서의 위안부 관련 내용 수정 시도를 비판하는 성명에 동참했다. 

이로써 애초 19명이었던 미국역사학회보 3월호의 성명 참여자는 20명으로 늘었다. 경향신문은 현재 교토대에서 연구년을 보내고 있는 고든 교수에게 ‘왜 이름을 올리게 됐는지’ e메일로 이유를 물어봤다.



고든 교수는 “어떠한 정부도 학자들에게 그들의 저술 내용에 대해 간섭해서는 안된다고 생각한다”며 “학문 연구의 자유에 대한 성명”이라고 말했다. 그는 “그렇다고 논쟁의 대상이 된 이 교과서의 모든 내용에 찬성한다는 의미는 아니다”라며 “내가 보기에 위안부 숫자를 과장하고 있고, 위안부 모집 과정 또한 교과서가 서술한 것보다 더 복잡했다”고 했다. 그는 “하지만 중요한 것은 일본 정부가 그 당시 이른바 위안부 시스템을 만들고 그 전반을 관장했다는 사실”이라고 강조했다. 그러면서 “그 시스템은 인도주의와 조선 등에서 온 여성의 자유를 침해했다. 이러한 점은 아시아 심지어 일본 등 전 세계의 모든 교과서에 포함돼야 한다”고 했다.

미 의회가 일본 총리로는 처음으로 아베 신조에게 상·하원 합동연설 기회를 준 것이 아베의 역사관을 승인한 것 아니냐는 물음에는 “그렇게 보지 않는다”고 답했다. 그는 “미 의회와 오바마 행정부는 아베의 역사관에 대해 초당적인 우려를 갖고 있고, 그가 올여름 종전 70주년 기념 연설에서 무엇을 말하고 무엇을 말하지 않을지 걱정하면서 보고 있을 것”이라고 했다. 이어 “아베가 무라야마·고노 담화보다 후퇴하는 성명을 낼 경우 그는 미 의회, 백악관, 언론, 지식인, 국민들로부터 강한 비판에 직면할 것”이라고 했다.

고든 교수는 미국 대학의 일본사 교재로 널리 쓰이는 <일본 근대사: 도쿠가와 시대에서 현재까지>(2003)의 저자로 일본의 노동, 계급 역사를 전공한 일본사 권위자다.