Comfort Women: Professor Mark Ramseyer Speaks Out as Truth Wins

In December of 2020, Harvard Law School professor and Japanese legal history expert Dr J Mark Ramseyer published an eight-page article on the comfort women issue at the International Review of Law and Economics. It was titled, “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War.” 

The paper quickly became the target for an international anti-Japan attack mob. Thousands of enraged attackers pressured the IRLE editorial board to cancel Professor Ramseyer’s paper.

In January of 2023, the International Review of Law and Economics editorial board announced that Professor Ramseyer’s 2020 paper would stand.

Last of 3 parts

First part: Harvard Professor’s Paper on the Comfort Women Issue Survives

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Second part: The Comfort Women: Scholars Fighting Historical Truth in East Asia

Professor Ramseyer Speaks Out

In late January 2023, JAPAN Forward reached out to Professor Ramseyer. His December, 2020 International Review of Law and Economics article on the comfort women had survived the very worst that the Twitter mob could throw at it—and him.

The mob also failed to ruin Professor Ramseyer’s career. He remains employed at Harvard Law School.

In an exclusive JAPAN Forward interview, Professor Ramseyer said that he was conflicted about the two-plus-year ordeal which he had endured.

“It’s great that the history is out,” Professor Ramseyer said. “It’s all available in English now. Seiji Yoshida, the communist writer who started the narrative the North Americans are pushing, and which the Asahi Shimbun newspaper trumpeted as historical fact ー all that is openly revealed as fiction.”

Takashi Uemura ー the Asahi reporter akin perhaps to the disgraced fake news-artist at the New York Times, Jayson Blair — spun Yoshida’s lies into lines and lines of newsprint.

Columbia University historian Carol Gluck, a prominent promoter of the North American comfort woman narrative, fêted Uemura. This was after the Asahi had…