In December of 2020, Harvard Law School professor and Japanese legal history expert 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.
Second of 3 parts
First part: Harvard Professor’s Paper on the Comfort Women Issue Survives
Losing Control of the Narrative
Professor David Ambaras has distinguished himself these past two years by his attacks on Harvard Law School professor J Mark Ramseyer.
Dr Ramseyer published a paper in late 2020 overturning the preferred narrative in North America that the Japanese military kidnapped hundreds of thousands of sex slaves during World War II. (It is a view held mainly by those with no ability to read Japanese source documents.)
Professor Ambaras has railed often on Twitter, and now on Mastodon, that Professor Ramseyer is a comfort woman “denialist” and that denialists must be deplatformed.
What Professor Ambaras tends to leave out of his oft-repeated Twitter-tantrums is indication of knowledge of comfort women history. What “denialist” seems to mean in this context is that Professor Ambaras is frustrated by his inability to control what used to be an easily-managed narrative.
Recall that Professor Ambaras, along with his fellow Twitter enthusiasts, was able to cow Mitch Shin, an assistant editor at The Diplomat. They forced him into taking down an article by South Korean economist Lee Wooyoun in November of 2021. Professor Lee had argued that Professor Ramseyer was…
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