Seeking the True Story of the Comfort Women
How a Harvard professor’s dubious scholarship reignited a history of mistrust between South Korea and Japan.
By Jeannie Suk Gersen
February 26, 2021
Students in Seoul protested an article by J. Mark Ramseyer, who argued that Korean women taken by Japan during the Second World War had chosen to be prostitutes.Photograph by Chris Jung / NurPhoto / Shutterstock
In January, I was outlining an article I hoped to write about a recent judgment by a South Korean court ordering Japan to pay compensation for atrocities committed during the Second World War against “comfort women,” women and girls who were transported to war-front “comfort stations” to provide sexual services to soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army. The women were taken by force or entrapped by deception in many countries in and beyond Asia, but a large number came from Korea, which, at the time, was a colony of Japan. Estimates of the number of victims have ranged widely, from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. On January 23rd, Japan announced that the Korean court’s judgment, which ordered a compensation of ninety-one thousand and eight hundred dollars to be paid to each of the twelve Korean comfort women who were plaintiffs in the case (seven of whom had died since it was filed, in 2013), was “extremely regrettable and absolutely unacceptable.” Japan said that it was not subject to Korea’s jurisdiction and considered the matter to have been previously settled. I was ruminating on how legal decisions relating to Second World War crimes against humanity might help resolve or aggravate historical traumas that seem impossible to leave in the past—in part, because they have been mired in waves of conflict and denial about the truth of what happened.
On January 31st, I began to receive messages from students and alumni of Harvard Law School, where I am a professor, about a longtime colleague of mine, J. Mark Ramseyer, a corporate-law specialist in Japanese legal studies. I knew him slightly, as an unassuming man in his late sixties who had ridden bikes with my husband and once advised us on what Japanese knives to buy. A child and grandchild of American Mennonite missionaries in Asia, he grew up in Japan. I knew that his scholarly contributions had included debunking conventional wisdom about the postwar Japanese economy.
The students and alumni wrote to tell me that Ramseyer had become front-page news in South Korea, owing to two recent articles he had written that challenged the historical consensus on comfort women. Ramseyer had made his views clear in “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” an article published online, in December, by the peer-reviewed journal International Review of Law and Economics (and forthcoming in print, this March), and in an op-ed published on January 12th in Japan Forward, an English-language Web site of Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper known for its conservative-nationalist bent. Read together, their message was unmistakable: the comfort-women system was not one in which Korean women were forced, coerced, and deceived into sexual servitude and confined under threat of violence. Ramseyer called that account “pure fiction.” Instead, he claimed that Korean comfort women “chose prostitution” and entered “multi-year indenture” agreements with entrepreneurs to work at war-front “brothels” in China and Southeast Asia. Purporting to use game theory, he said that the economic structure of the contracts reflected that the sex work was voluntarily chosen. “Prostitutes have followed armies everywhere, and they followed the Japanese army in Asia,” he wrote.
The news of Ramseyer’s article had been reported favorably in Japan, and then made its way to Korea and across the globe. It was a controversy that was not merely academic but that could potentially affect the troubled diplomatic relations between Japan and Korea, and also the delicate role played by the United States as their mutual ally. In the U.S., two members of Congress tweeted that Ramseyer’s claims were “disgusting,” and the State Department affirmed that “the trafficking of women for sexual purposes by the Japanese military during World War II was an egregious violation of human rights.” I understood that messages about Ramseyer were being sent to me, specifically, because I was the first Asian-American woman, and the first and only ethnic Korean, to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. I was born in Seoul, and my parents were refugees from their ancestral home, in North Korea, during the Korean War. At least one alumnus wrote to say that, because of my position, ethnicity, feminism, and writing on matters of justice, my silence was “complicity.”
After I spent time digesting my colleague’s reasoning, I spoke with him to say that we were about to have a public disagreement, but that I would not be joining or encouraging any possible calls for institutional penalty for his exercise of academic freedom to engage in scholarship or express his opinion. I posted a brief critique of Ramseyer’s arguments on social media, explaining that contract analysis assumes voluntary bargaining by free agents, and that when sex is mandatory, without the option to refuse or walk away, it cannot fairly be described as contractual.
Students in Seoul protested an article by J. Mark Ramseyer, who argued that Korean women taken by Japan during the Second World War had chosen to be prostitutes.Photograph by Chris Jung / NurPhoto / ShutterstockIn January, I was outlining an article I hoped to write about a recent judgment by a South Korean court ordering Japan to pay compensation for atrocities committed during the Second World War against “comfort women,” women and girls who were transported to war-front “comfort stations” to provide sexual services to soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army. The women were taken by force or entrapped by deception in many countries in and beyond Asia, but a large number came from Korea, which, at the time, was a colony of Japan. Estimates of the number of victims have ranged widely, from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. On January 23rd, Japan announced that the Korean court’s judgment, which ordered a compensation of ninety-one thousand and eight hundred dollars to be paid to each of the twelve Korean comfort women who were plaintiffs in the case (seven of whom had died since it was filed, in 2013), was “extremely regrettable and absolutely unacceptable.” Japan said that it was not subject to Korea’s jurisdiction and considered the matter to have been previously settled. I was ruminating on how legal decisions relating to Second World War crimes against humanity might help resolve or aggravate historical traumas that seem impossible to leave in the past—in part, because they have been mired in waves of conflict and denial about the truth of what happened.
On January 31st, I began to receive messages from students and alumni of Harvard Law School, where I am a professor, about a longtime colleague of mine, J. Mark Ramseyer, a corporate-law specialist in Japanese legal studies. I knew him slightly, as an unassuming man in his late sixties who had ridden bikes with my husband and once advised us on what Japanese knives to buy. A child and grandchild of American Mennonite missionaries in Asia, he grew up in Japan. I knew that his scholarly contributions had included debunking conventional wisdom about the postwar Japanese economy.
The students and alumni wrote to tell me that Ramseyer had become front-page news in South Korea, owing to two recent articles he had written that challenged the historical consensus on comfort women. Ramseyer had made his views clear in “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” an article published online, in December, by the peer-reviewed journal International Review of Law and Economics (and forthcoming in print, this March), and in an op-ed published on January 12th in Japan Forward, an English-language Web site of Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper known for its conservative-nationalist bent. Read together, their message was unmistakable: the comfort-women system was not one in which Korean women were forced, coerced, and deceived into sexual servitude and confined under threat of violence. Ramseyer called that account “pure fiction.” Instead, he claimed that Korean comfort women “chose prostitution” and entered “multi-year indenture” agreements with entrepreneurs to work at war-front “brothels” in China and Southeast Asia. Purporting to use game theory, he said that the economic structure of the contracts reflected that the sex work was voluntarily chosen. “Prostitutes have followed armies everywhere, and they followed the Japanese army in Asia,” he wrote.
The news of Ramseyer’s article had been reported favorably in Japan, and then made its way to Korea and across the globe. It was a controversy that was not merely academic but that could potentially affect the troubled diplomatic relations between Japan and Korea, and also the delicate role played by the United States as their mutual ally. In the U.S., two members of Congress tweeted that Ramseyer’s claims were “disgusting,” and the State Department affirmed that “the trafficking of women for sexual purposes by the Japanese military during World War II was an egregious violation of human rights.” I understood that messages about Ramseyer were being sent to me, specifically, because I was the first Asian-American woman, and the first and only ethnic Korean, to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. I was born in Seoul, and my parents were refugees from their ancestral home, in North Korea, during the Korean War. At least one alumnus wrote to say that, because of my position, ethnicity, feminism, and writing on matters of justice, my silence was “complicity.”
After I spent time digesting my colleague’s reasoning, I spoke with him to say that we were about to have a public disagreement, but that I would not be joining or encouraging any possible calls for institutional penalty for his exercise of academic freedom to engage in scholarship or express his opinion. I posted a brief critique of Ramseyer’s arguments on social media, explaining that contract analysis assumes voluntary bargaining by free agents, and that when sex is mandatory, without the option to refuse or walk away, it cannot fairly be described as contractual.
I was confident that he would not have described it as such if he believed comfort women’s accounts of having been conscripted and confined by force, threats, deception, and coercion. It seemed to me that his view reflected a prior choice not to credit those accounts because he deemed them inconsistent, or, as he wrote, “self-interested” and “uncorroborated.” I noticed, however, that he did choose to credit Japanese government denials, even where they contradicted other statements by the government. Trying to read my colleague’s work most generously, I thought his views might be a product of a skepticism of generally accepted wisdom that had informed his academic career. I approached the matter in the vein of criticism and disagreement over facts, logic, and interpretation, regarding a subject that triggered strong emotions around nationalism and human rights. I expected that scholars, by delving into Ramseyer’s research, would be able to further assess the accuracy of his claims; I could not have imagined how straightforward and yet how mystifying that work would prove to be.
Despite how easy it may be to reduce the issue to a conflict between Korea and Japan, victim and perpetrator, or women and men, historians have carefully explored the features and meanings of the comfort-women system, which involved several hundred comfort stations in war-torn Asia, individuals of many nationalities, and myriad experiences. Scholars have debated the precise role that the Japanese military played, along with private recruiters, in procuring the women. In South Korea, reckoning with the role of native recruiters in entrapping fellow-Koreans, and with impoverished families in allowing their girls to be taken, has been difficult, to say the least.
Despite how easy it may be to reduce the issue to a conflict between Korea and Japan, victim and perpetrator, or women and men, historians have carefully explored the features and meanings of the comfort-women system, which involved several hundred comfort stations in war-torn Asia, individuals of many nationalities, and myriad experiences. Scholars have debated the precise role that the Japanese military played, along with private recruiters, in procuring the women. In South Korea, reckoning with the role of native recruiters in entrapping fellow-Koreans, and with impoverished families in allowing their girls to be taken, has been difficult, to say the least.
There have been debates about whether the phrase “sex slavery,” given its common associations with chattel slavery, best captures the non-chattel situation of abuse and rape in brutal confinement. Over decades, historians have determined that there was a range of force or coercion used against comfort women, but that violence and threats were endemic. By contrast, Ramseyer’s statements seemed intent on flattening the complexity down to a plain denial: Korean comfort women went to the war front as voluntary prostitutes. [?]
The end of Japanese colonialism in Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and the Western Pacific, following the Empire’s surrender to the U.S. at the conclusion of the Second World War, began seven decades of recrimination, apology, and denial over Japan’s wartime atrocities. Japan recognized Korea’s independence in a peace treaty with the Allied Powers, signed in San Francisco, in 1951. In 1965, a treaty between South Korea and Japan normalized their relations, and the countries agreed that “the problems concerning property, rights, and interests” of each “have been settled completely and finally,” and that “no claims shall be made with respect to the measures relating” to them. The comfort women were not specifically mentioned, which led to later conflict about whether their claims had indeed been settled.
For decades, the issue of comfort women was not widely discussed in Korea, the society of which stigmatized and ostracized sexual-assault victims. But, by the early nineties, the survivors had begun to share their experiences publicly. In 1993, Japan issued the watershed Kono Statement, which admitted the Japanese military’s involvement in the comfort stations and in recruiting women “against their own will,” and said that “they lived in misery at comfort stations under a coercive atmosphere.” Japan extended “sincere apologies and remorse,” and promised to “face squarely the historical facts” with “firm determination never to repeat the same mistake by forever engraving such issues in our memories through the study and teaching of history.”
The end of Japanese colonialism in Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and the Western Pacific, following the Empire’s surrender to the U.S. at the conclusion of the Second World War, began seven decades of recrimination, apology, and denial over Japan’s wartime atrocities. Japan recognized Korea’s independence in a peace treaty with the Allied Powers, signed in San Francisco, in 1951. In 1965, a treaty between South Korea and Japan normalized their relations, and the countries agreed that “the problems concerning property, rights, and interests” of each “have been settled completely and finally,” and that “no claims shall be made with respect to the measures relating” to them. The comfort women were not specifically mentioned, which led to later conflict about whether their claims had indeed been settled.
For decades, the issue of comfort women was not widely discussed in Korea, the society of which stigmatized and ostracized sexual-assault victims. But, by the early nineties, the survivors had begun to share their experiences publicly. In 1993, Japan issued the watershed Kono Statement, which admitted the Japanese military’s involvement in the comfort stations and in recruiting women “against their own will,” and said that “they lived in misery at comfort stations under a coercive atmosphere.” Japan extended “sincere apologies and remorse,” and promised to “face squarely the historical facts” with “firm determination never to repeat the same mistake by forever engraving such issues in our memories through the study and teaching of history.”
But after Prime Minister Shinzō Abe took office, in 2006, Japan appeared to back away from the Kono Statement’s apologetic stance. Under Abe, the environment in Japan became “inhospitable to objective historical inquiry” on the subject of comfort women, as Alexis Dudden, a historian of modern Japan and Korea at the University of Connecticut, put it. A key example was an attempt by the Japanese Foreign Ministry, in 2014, to pressure McGraw Hill to erase several paragraphs on comfort women from one of its world-history textbooks; the publisher refused, citing scholars’ work in establishing historical facts. Abe lamented the outcome, saying, “This kind of textbook is being used in the United States, as we did not protest the things we should have, or we failed to correct the things we should have.”
In 2015, twenty historians in the U.S. (including my New Yorker colleague Jelani Cobb) published a letter in the magazine of the American Historical Association expressing “dismay at recent attempts by the Japanese government to suppress statements in history textbooks” about comfort women. They compared Japan’s efforts to erase Second World War atrocities to American education boards’ efforts to “rewrite school textbooks to obscure accounts of African American slavery.” One of the signatories was Andrew Gordon, a historian of modern Japan at Harvard University. Later that year, Gordon and Dudden were among the organizers of a separate letter about comfort women, which was eventually signed by hundreds of scholars of Japanese studies at universities on several continents. Referring to the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the scholars wrote that “the evidence makes clear that large numbers of women were held against their will and subjected to horrific brutality,” and that “only careful weighing and contextual evaluation of every trace of the past can produce a just history.” The scholars defended “the freedom of historical inquiry” and called upon governments to do the same.
Meanwhile, in South Korea, resentment about Japan’s attempts to downplay its responsibility had been building, sometimes hardening into intolerance of anything short of a purist story of the Japanese military kidnapping Korean virgins for sex slavery at gunpoint. In 2015, a Korean academic named Park Yu-ha was sued civilly by comfort women for defamation, and criminally indicted by Korean prosecutors, for the publication of a book that explored the role of Koreans in recruiting the women and the loving relationships that some comfort women developed with Japanese soldiers while they were confined in a “slavelike condition.” The book did not, as some have claimed, absolve Japan of responsibility or deny the comfort women’s brutal victimization. Gordon, the Harvard historian of modern Japan, signed onto a letter with sixty-six other scholars, in Japan and the U.S., expressing “great consternation and concern” at the South Korean government’s indictment of Park, and conveying appreciation for her book’s scholarly achievement. Park was ultimately found civilly liable, and was ordered to pay damages to comfort women; she was acquitted of the criminal defamation charges, with the trial court citing her academic freedom, but an appellate court overturned that verdict and fined her.
==
In 2015, twenty historians in the U.S. (including my New Yorker colleague Jelani Cobb) published a letter in the magazine of the American Historical Association expressing “dismay at recent attempts by the Japanese government to suppress statements in history textbooks” about comfort women. They compared Japan’s efforts to erase Second World War atrocities to American education boards’ efforts to “rewrite school textbooks to obscure accounts of African American slavery.” One of the signatories was Andrew Gordon, a historian of modern Japan at Harvard University. Later that year, Gordon and Dudden were among the organizers of a separate letter about comfort women, which was eventually signed by hundreds of scholars of Japanese studies at universities on several continents. Referring to the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the scholars wrote that “the evidence makes clear that large numbers of women were held against their will and subjected to horrific brutality,” and that “only careful weighing and contextual evaluation of every trace of the past can produce a just history.” The scholars defended “the freedom of historical inquiry” and called upon governments to do the same.
Meanwhile, in South Korea, resentment about Japan’s attempts to downplay its responsibility had been building, sometimes hardening into intolerance of anything short of a purist story of the Japanese military kidnapping Korean virgins for sex slavery at gunpoint. In 2015, a Korean academic named Park Yu-ha was sued civilly by comfort women for defamation, and criminally indicted by Korean prosecutors, for the publication of a book that explored the role of Koreans in recruiting the women and the loving relationships that some comfort women developed with Japanese soldiers while they were confined in a “slavelike condition.” The book did not, as some have claimed, absolve Japan of responsibility or deny the comfort women’s brutal victimization. Gordon, the Harvard historian of modern Japan, signed onto a letter with sixty-six other scholars, in Japan and the U.S., expressing “great consternation and concern” at the South Korean government’s indictment of Park, and conveying appreciation for her book’s scholarly achievement. Park was ultimately found civilly liable, and was ordered to pay damages to comfort women; she was acquitted of the criminal defamation charges, with the trial court citing her academic freedom, but an appellate court overturned that verdict and fined her.
==
In 2015, Japan and Korea reached a new agreement, with the encouragement of the Obama Administration, in which Prime Minister Abe expressed “his most sincere apologies and remorse” to the comfort women. Japan contributed $8.3 million to a Korean fund to compensate comfort women, and the two governments promised to “refrain from accusing or criticizing each other regarding this issue in the international community.” Both sides said that the comfort-women issue was “resolved finally and irreversibly.”
But the Korean comfort women maintain that their government made this deal without consulting them, in a betrayal by Park Geun-hye, the country’s first female President, who likely wished to obtain Japan’s apology and compensation before the remaining survivors died. The deal was further delegitimized in South Korea when President Park was removed from office, in 2017, and the new President, Moon Jae-in, said that his predecessor’s agreement “cannot solve the comfort women issue.” Meanwhile, Japan has furiously objected to the installation of comfort-women statues around the world: it filed a brief in a U.S. lawsuit that unsuccessfully sought the removal of a memorial in a Los Angeles suburb, and terminated Osaka’s sister-city relationship with San Francisco after a monument was installed there. Japan’s rhetoric has escalated since the Korean court’s decision ordering it to apologize and pay compensation.
This month, new language appeared on the Web site of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, omitting mention of the Kono Statement and decrying “claims that can hardly be said to be based on historical facts, such as the allegations of ‘forceful taking away’ of comfort women and ‘sex slaves.’ ”
The politics of Japan and South Korea’s dispute are difficult to unravel, but the question of how Ramseyer had come to his conclusion about Korean comfort women turned out to be a separate confounding matter. Early this month, Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert, another Harvard historian, were among the academics who were invited to write a response to Ramseyer in International Review of Law and Economics, the journal that had published his article. (I, too, was invited.) Eckert and Gordon decided to work on a response together. Reviewing Ramseyer’s footnotes, they found that there were no contracts involving Korean women at wartime comfort stations cited, nor secondary sources detailing those contracts, nor even any third-party accounts that confirm the relevant terms. When they examined the one cited source that seemed as if it might lead to data about relevant contracts, from 1938, they found that it provided sample contracts for employment of a Japanese woman as a “barmaid”—“shakufu” in Japanese, a job understood to involve sex work. To know the meaning of a labor contract, one must know the nature of the labor, the pay, and the duration. But, from what Eckert and Gordon could tell from their tracking of Ramseyer’s sources, none led to information about the terms of the contracts, written or oral, with Korean women.
Eckert and Gordon did not think it was reasonable to infer, from sample prewar or wartime prostitution contracts for Japanese women, that Korean women entered similarly termed or structured contracts for sex work serving the Japanese military at the front. The historians also noted that, even assuming Korean women or their families had entered contracts for the women to work at comfort stations, they may not have known the sexual purpose for which they were being recruited—in which case, any contracts could not be considered voluntary. Eckert and Gordon explained, in a statement, that in the decades leading up to the Second World War the term “comfort station” (“ianjo,” in Japanese, and “wianso,” in Korean) would not necessarily have communicated a sexual meaning, having been used in both Japanese and Korean newspapers of the period to refer to such things as recreation areas in municipal parks, a hotel, a shelter for children, and a hot-springs spa. Gordon also shared with me his translation of an article from 1940 in a major Japanese newspaper, which reported on a Japanese woman who travelled to northern China based on a recruiting ad for a “comfort woman,” and who was surprised to learn, upon arrival, the true nature of the work; the author of the article assumed that the reader, too, would not have known that “comfort woman” meant sex worker.
Determining that it wasn’t possible to respond to Ramseyer’s empirical claims without being able to examine the evidence, Eckert and Gordon wrote to the journal’s editors to say that there was a “problem of academic integrity” and to request a retraction of Ramseyer’s article. Within days, the journal issued an “Expression of Concern,” alerting readers that “concerns have been raised regarding the historical evidence” in the article, and that the “claims are currently being investigated.”
When I spoke to Ramseyer for this article, he said, “I don’t have any Korean contracts.” He further explained that he was “building on” an article he’d written in 1991 about indentured-servitude contracts for prostitution in prewar Japan, based on “vast amounts of discussion in historical records.” That article on prewar prostitution did not address war-front sex work during the Second World War or Korean comfort women. Ramseyer told me, “I thought it would be cool if we could get the contracts” for Korean comfort women. “But I haven’t been able to find it. Certainly you’re not going to find it.” Because he’d argued in the 1991 article that Japanese prewar prostitution-indenture contracts were largely for voluntary labor rather than “slavery,” I gathered he thought that, if Korean women had similar contracts for work in wartime comfort stations, that labor could also be characterized as voluntary rather than sex slavery.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, a senior figure in modern Japanese history and an emeritus professor at the Australian National University, also wrote to the journal to ask that Ramseyer’s article be retracted. In her letter, she noted that, “bizarrely, he transposed his earlier research from one place and historical period to another, so that a study which was originally about systems that existed in Japan in the 1920s and early 1930s was now presented as a statement about the late 1930s to 1940s wartime ‘comfort station’ system, despite the fact that this system operated in a different time, in different places and in drastically different circumstances.” Morris-Suzuki also pointed out that, in many instances, Ramseyer’s sources were at odds with the claims for which he used them. In one case, Ramseyer wrote that “the Japanese government drafted recruiting regulations designed to select only prostitutes already in the industry,” and cited two official Japanese documents. Morris-Suzuki found that one of those documents actually shows that “some women had been recruited by ‘something close to kidnapping.’ ”
Amy Stanley, a professor of Japanese history at Northwestern University, who has written books on Japanese prostitution and women’s social history, told me the established historical evidence that Ramseyer omitted—about physical violence and threats used to keep women from escaping the comfort stations—“destroy” his argument that women stayed there voluntarily. Stanley worked with four other scholars of Japanese history, on three continents, to produce a thirty-five-page document laying out Ramseyer’s misrepresentations of his Japanese sources and highlighting his inaccurate citation practices.
The politics of Japan and South Korea’s dispute are difficult to unravel, but the question of how Ramseyer had come to his conclusion about Korean comfort women turned out to be a separate confounding matter. Early this month, Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert, another Harvard historian, were among the academics who were invited to write a response to Ramseyer in International Review of Law and Economics, the journal that had published his article. (I, too, was invited.) Eckert and Gordon decided to work on a response together. Reviewing Ramseyer’s footnotes, they found that there were no contracts involving Korean women at wartime comfort stations cited, nor secondary sources detailing those contracts, nor even any third-party accounts that confirm the relevant terms. When they examined the one cited source that seemed as if it might lead to data about relevant contracts, from 1938, they found that it provided sample contracts for employment of a Japanese woman as a “barmaid”—“shakufu” in Japanese, a job understood to involve sex work. To know the meaning of a labor contract, one must know the nature of the labor, the pay, and the duration. But, from what Eckert and Gordon could tell from their tracking of Ramseyer’s sources, none led to information about the terms of the contracts, written or oral, with Korean women.
Eckert and Gordon did not think it was reasonable to infer, from sample prewar or wartime prostitution contracts for Japanese women, that Korean women entered similarly termed or structured contracts for sex work serving the Japanese military at the front. The historians also noted that, even assuming Korean women or their families had entered contracts for the women to work at comfort stations, they may not have known the sexual purpose for which they were being recruited—in which case, any contracts could not be considered voluntary. Eckert and Gordon explained, in a statement, that in the decades leading up to the Second World War the term “comfort station” (“ianjo,” in Japanese, and “wianso,” in Korean) would not necessarily have communicated a sexual meaning, having been used in both Japanese and Korean newspapers of the period to refer to such things as recreation areas in municipal parks, a hotel, a shelter for children, and a hot-springs spa. Gordon also shared with me his translation of an article from 1940 in a major Japanese newspaper, which reported on a Japanese woman who travelled to northern China based on a recruiting ad for a “comfort woman,” and who was surprised to learn, upon arrival, the true nature of the work; the author of the article assumed that the reader, too, would not have known that “comfort woman” meant sex worker.
Determining that it wasn’t possible to respond to Ramseyer’s empirical claims without being able to examine the evidence, Eckert and Gordon wrote to the journal’s editors to say that there was a “problem of academic integrity” and to request a retraction of Ramseyer’s article. Within days, the journal issued an “Expression of Concern,” alerting readers that “concerns have been raised regarding the historical evidence” in the article, and that the “claims are currently being investigated.”
When I spoke to Ramseyer for this article, he said, “I don’t have any Korean contracts.” He further explained that he was “building on” an article he’d written in 1991 about indentured-servitude contracts for prostitution in prewar Japan, based on “vast amounts of discussion in historical records.” That article on prewar prostitution did not address war-front sex work during the Second World War or Korean comfort women. Ramseyer told me, “I thought it would be cool if we could get the contracts” for Korean comfort women. “But I haven’t been able to find it. Certainly you’re not going to find it.” Because he’d argued in the 1991 article that Japanese prewar prostitution-indenture contracts were largely for voluntary labor rather than “slavery,” I gathered he thought that, if Korean women had similar contracts for work in wartime comfort stations, that labor could also be characterized as voluntary rather than sex slavery.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, a senior figure in modern Japanese history and an emeritus professor at the Australian National University, also wrote to the journal to ask that Ramseyer’s article be retracted. In her letter, she noted that, “bizarrely, he transposed his earlier research from one place and historical period to another, so that a study which was originally about systems that existed in Japan in the 1920s and early 1930s was now presented as a statement about the late 1930s to 1940s wartime ‘comfort station’ system, despite the fact that this system operated in a different time, in different places and in drastically different circumstances.” Morris-Suzuki also pointed out that, in many instances, Ramseyer’s sources were at odds with the claims for which he used them. In one case, Ramseyer wrote that “the Japanese government drafted recruiting regulations designed to select only prostitutes already in the industry,” and cited two official Japanese documents. Morris-Suzuki found that one of those documents actually shows that “some women had been recruited by ‘something close to kidnapping.’ ”
Amy Stanley, a professor of Japanese history at Northwestern University, who has written books on Japanese prostitution and women’s social history, told me the established historical evidence that Ramseyer omitted—about physical violence and threats used to keep women from escaping the comfort stations—“destroy” his argument that women stayed there voluntarily. Stanley worked with four other scholars of Japanese history, on three continents, to produce a thirty-five-page document laying out Ramseyer’s misrepresentations of his Japanese sources and highlighting his inaccurate citation practices.
Like Morris-Suzuki, Stanley and her colleagues observed that Ramseyer’s statements in the article were often plainly contrary to the sources he cited for their support. In one striking example, Ramseyer wrote about a young Japanese girl who went to Borneo to work as a prostitute: “When Osaki turned ten, a recruiter stopped by and offered her 300 yen upfront if she would agree to go abroad. The recruiter did not try to trick her; even at age ten, she knew what the job entailed.” (Ramseyer raised no question about a ten-year-old’s ability to consent to sex.) Stanley and her colleagues found that the girl’s testimony, in the book that Ramseyer cited, actually said that she and other girls resisted, saying to the brothel keeper, “You brought us here without ever mentioning that kind of work, and now you tell us to take customers. You liar!” The girl further recalled, “After our first night, we were terrified. We hadn’t realized this was what men and women did. It was so horrible, we could hardly believe it.” The scholars also found it “curious” that, while purporting to describe a voluntary contract system, Ramseyer referred to the employer as Osaki’s “owner.” (Ramseyer e-mailed me to say that he was “puzzled and troubled” upon reading the scholars’ allegation of his misstatement, and added, “I don’t know how this happened, but I did in fact make a mistake here.”)
Michael Chwe, an economist who teaches game theory at U.C.L.A., is an organizer of a group of economists who are calling for the retraction of Ramseyer’s article. “No matter what field you’re in—economics, history, sociology, whatever—there are certain scholarly standards which must be applied,” Chwe told me. “And one of them is, when you cite something, you cite in a way which is true to the source.”
Michael Chwe, an economist who teaches game theory at U.C.L.A., is an organizer of a group of economists who are calling for the retraction of Ramseyer’s article. “No matter what field you’re in—economics, history, sociology, whatever—there are certain scholarly standards which must be applied,” Chwe told me. “And one of them is, when you cite something, you cite in a way which is true to the source.”
More than a thousand economists, many of whom have served as editors of academic journals, have signed Chwe’s public statement rebuffing the idea that economics or game theory justifies Ramseyer’s conclusions. “Game-theoretic principles can be used to interpret many coercive situations, from crime and punishment to nuclear warfare,” they write. “But invoking game theory does not establish the absence of violent exploitation or predation. It does not allow one to conclude that such interactions were consensual. Game-theoretic principles do not provide some magical cover or authority for the article’s reckless claims.”
Alex Lee, a professor at Northwestern’s law school, signed the economists’ statement. He was also among more than thirty associate editors who participated in the journal’s peer-review process. Not having been involved in selecting Ramseyer’s article, Lee became alarmed, upon reading it, that its sweeping claims were not properly supported. He got in touch with an editor and received permission to seek responses from several historians of modern Japan and Korea. (He also invited me to respond.) A few days later, Lee chose to resign from the journal. “The decision to publish this article is, at best, a serious error in judgment, and at worst, highly irresponsible and unethical,” Lee wrote to me, in a statement. “If the journal is not equipped to assess the revisionist historical claims of this magnitude, which can cause serious damage, it should never have accepted the article for publication.” (The journal did not respond to a request for comment.)
===
My conversations with scholars who spent the past three weeks investigating Ramseyer’s claims have been remarkable to me because of the strength of their commitment to upholding professional standards and procedures. While his claims are provocative and distressing to many, the scholars’ concern was not that, but only the claims’ truth. Eckert and Gordon have spoken out in defense of the academic freedom to follow evidence to uncomfortable or debatable places, including on the topic of comfort women. They and other historians I spoke to objected to the persecution of Park Yu-ha, whose book on comfort women produced insights that could be argued over, based on the evidence. Each of the historians also defended the work of another scholar, C. Sarah Soh, whose textured study of comfort women, which explores the responsibility of Korea’s patriarchal society in the abusive system, has been weaponized by deniers and attacked unjustifiably as being anti-Korean or of absolving Japan. In the researchers’ view, the key issue is scholarly responsibility.
Ramseyer e-mailed me to identify people—in Korea, Japan, and elsewhere—who are supportive of him. He alerted me to a public statement decrying a “witch-hunt” against him, signed by fifteen Korean individuals. They included four co-authors of the book “Anti-Japan Tribalism,” from 2019, which includes the claim that the story of sex slavery in the case of the comfort women is a lie. One of signatories is a retired economics professor at Seoul National University who was seen in a video slapping a reporter; another is an academic who was punched while leading a demonstration for the removal of a comfort-women statue. Their statement pointed out that Ramseyer’s article was “published by the International Review of Law and Economics, a renowned international academic journal, after his paper received appropriate evaluations including peer review.” On February 8th, six people affiliated with Japanese institutions, who identified themselves as historians, issued an open letter defending Ramseyer’s academic integrity and urging against “canceling” his work. Most don’t appear to have history degrees, and most are connected to a right-wing group that is focussed on denying Japanese wartime atrocities.
Ramseyer also showed me supportive letters that two U.S. colleagues in Japanese studies had sent to the journal. One was sent, on February 4th, by Mary Elizabeth Berry, a Japanese historian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Berry wrote that Ramseyer’s “research is formidable, exacting, and carefully marshaled,” and that she believed his analysis reflected “a mainstream position among reputable scholars in Japan.” But, after she read the documents identifying problems with the article’s integrity, she wrote to me, saying, “They are very powerful. Mark needs to respond to them thoroughly. And to admit error, as appropriate.” Another supportive letter came from David Weinstein, a professor of Japanese economics at Columbia, who wrote, also on February 4th, that “it is important for academic journals to sometimes publish controversial, fact-based pieces and let readers decide for themselves which arguments are persuasive.” But, upon reading the historians’ findings, Weinstein said, “If the editors decide that their refereeing process failed to catch serious errors in the representation of the underlying facts, then retraction would be appropriate.”
Alex Lee, a professor at Northwestern’s law school, signed the economists’ statement. He was also among more than thirty associate editors who participated in the journal’s peer-review process. Not having been involved in selecting Ramseyer’s article, Lee became alarmed, upon reading it, that its sweeping claims were not properly supported. He got in touch with an editor and received permission to seek responses from several historians of modern Japan and Korea. (He also invited me to respond.) A few days later, Lee chose to resign from the journal. “The decision to publish this article is, at best, a serious error in judgment, and at worst, highly irresponsible and unethical,” Lee wrote to me, in a statement. “If the journal is not equipped to assess the revisionist historical claims of this magnitude, which can cause serious damage, it should never have accepted the article for publication.” (The journal did not respond to a request for comment.)
===
My conversations with scholars who spent the past three weeks investigating Ramseyer’s claims have been remarkable to me because of the strength of their commitment to upholding professional standards and procedures. While his claims are provocative and distressing to many, the scholars’ concern was not that, but only the claims’ truth. Eckert and Gordon have spoken out in defense of the academic freedom to follow evidence to uncomfortable or debatable places, including on the topic of comfort women. They and other historians I spoke to objected to the persecution of Park Yu-ha, whose book on comfort women produced insights that could be argued over, based on the evidence. Each of the historians also defended the work of another scholar, C. Sarah Soh, whose textured study of comfort women, which explores the responsibility of Korea’s patriarchal society in the abusive system, has been weaponized by deniers and attacked unjustifiably as being anti-Korean or of absolving Japan. In the researchers’ view, the key issue is scholarly responsibility.
Ramseyer e-mailed me to identify people—in Korea, Japan, and elsewhere—who are supportive of him. He alerted me to a public statement decrying a “witch-hunt” against him, signed by fifteen Korean individuals. They included four co-authors of the book “Anti-Japan Tribalism,” from 2019, which includes the claim that the story of sex slavery in the case of the comfort women is a lie. One of signatories is a retired economics professor at Seoul National University who was seen in a video slapping a reporter; another is an academic who was punched while leading a demonstration for the removal of a comfort-women statue. Their statement pointed out that Ramseyer’s article was “published by the International Review of Law and Economics, a renowned international academic journal, after his paper received appropriate evaluations including peer review.” On February 8th, six people affiliated with Japanese institutions, who identified themselves as historians, issued an open letter defending Ramseyer’s academic integrity and urging against “canceling” his work. Most don’t appear to have history degrees, and most are connected to a right-wing group that is focussed on denying Japanese wartime atrocities.
Ramseyer also showed me supportive letters that two U.S. colleagues in Japanese studies had sent to the journal. One was sent, on February 4th, by Mary Elizabeth Berry, a Japanese historian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Berry wrote that Ramseyer’s “research is formidable, exacting, and carefully marshaled,” and that she believed his analysis reflected “a mainstream position among reputable scholars in Japan.” But, after she read the documents identifying problems with the article’s integrity, she wrote to me, saying, “They are very powerful. Mark needs to respond to them thoroughly. And to admit error, as appropriate.” Another supportive letter came from David Weinstein, a professor of Japanese economics at Columbia, who wrote, also on February 4th, that “it is important for academic journals to sometimes publish controversial, fact-based pieces and let readers decide for themselves which arguments are persuasive.” But, upon reading the historians’ findings, Weinstein said, “If the editors decide that their refereeing process failed to catch serious errors in the representation of the underlying facts, then retraction would be appropriate.”
===
I defend the right of academics to express unpopular opinions or views with which I strongly disagree. But the Ramseyer matter has revealed a strong consensus that academic freedom comes with the responsibility, when making claims about facts, to have proper grounding in evidence. In continuing to investigate Ramseyer’s work, scholars have found that he misused historical sources in several recent articles on minority groups that have been subject to severe discrimination in Japan: the Burakumin, a formerly hereditary outcast group; Okinawans; and Koreans. David Ambaras, a professor of Japanese social history at North Carolina State University, told me that he and other scholars were examining the factual bases of Ramseyer’s claims about the Burakumin and Korean minorities, but had not yet made their findings public.
I defend the right of academics to express unpopular opinions or views with which I strongly disagree. But the Ramseyer matter has revealed a strong consensus that academic freedom comes with the responsibility, when making claims about facts, to have proper grounding in evidence. In continuing to investigate Ramseyer’s work, scholars have found that he misused historical sources in several recent articles on minority groups that have been subject to severe discrimination in Japan: the Burakumin, a formerly hereditary outcast group; Okinawans; and Koreans. David Ambaras, a professor of Japanese social history at North Carolina State University, told me that he and other scholars were examining the factual bases of Ramseyer’s claims about the Burakumin and Korean minorities, but had not yet made their findings public.
On Saturday, Alon Harel, a law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the co-editor of the forthcoming “Cambridge Handbook of Privatization,” told a Korean news agency that he and his co-editor, Avihay Dorfman, of Tel Aviv University’s law school, had asked Ramseyer to “significantly” revise a chapter he had contributed to the book, which casts doubt on historians’ estimates that six thousand people were killed in a 1923 massacre of Koreans in Japan. In the chapter, Ramseyer characterizes young Koreans as a “high crime group” and repeats discredited rumors about Koreans torching buildings and raping civilians. “We assumed that Professor Ramseyer knows the history better than us,” Harel said, taking responsibility for “an innocent and very regrettable mistake on our part.” On Tuesday, the European Journal of Law and Economics, which days earlier had published the article on which the forthcoming Cambridge University Press chapter is based, alerted readers that it was investigating concerns with the article.
Morris-Suzuki, the historian, wrote to the editors of the journal that, in her forty years as an academic, “this is the worst example of the failure of academic standards” that she has witnessed in her area of research. “It represents a major breakdown in the entire peer review process.” In particular, it may indicate flaws in peer review within legal academia. As experts of methods (including doctrinal analysis, legal interpretation, law-and-economics) or substantive areas (contracts, torts, property), legal academics are often expected to review writing in areas on which they are far from expert, involving historical contexts they have not studied and languages they do not know. This generalist approach, which makes legal academics capable of avoiding silos in a way that is intellectually stimulating, operates on trust in the diligence and rigor of the individual scholar. Following the Ramseyer episode, it may have to be reëvaluated.
For the wider world, however, why not simply ignore articles that are not factually supported? As Morris-Suzuki noted, there are “all sorts of strange articles out there, by all sorts of strange people.” But, in Ramseyer’s case, she said, “the fact that it’s by a Harvard professor gives it a degree of prominence and respectability, which makes it important to look at carefully.” Indeed, in the past weeks, I have heard from colleagues who said that they hadn’t known, until they read Ramseyer’s article, that the “conventional” story about comfort women was in question. Morris-Suzuki thinks this is a “really good test case” for the contemporary problem of people “being overwhelmed by things that present themselves as fact but are not properly based in fact”—not just in academia but in the media and on the Internet. Ramseyer has framed his work on comfort women as that of a debunker coming to refute what he called a “pure fiction” adopted by an academic consensus obsessed with the “trifecta” of “sexism, racism, and imperialism.”
Morris-Suzuki has produced a “study aid,” with Ramseyer’s comfort-women article as the case study, to teach students how to maintain principles of research integrity while also supporting free speech. It explains, “If there are no ground rules, then academic journals would have no basis for rejecting any paper submitted to them, and any statement of opinion—however lacking in logic or factual evidence—would have to be treated as equal to any other. We could then very easily end up spending much of the rest of our lives debating conspiracy theories or fake news which have no intellectual foundation whatever. To put it at its simplest and crudest, if there are no research standards, then we may as well all pack up and go home, because anything goes and any truth claim is just as good as any other.”
In Korea and Japan, controversies about comfort women are nothing new. What appears new is having a familiar extreme denialist position emanate from a university that many around the world associate with legitimate scholarship.
Morris-Suzuki, the historian, wrote to the editors of the journal that, in her forty years as an academic, “this is the worst example of the failure of academic standards” that she has witnessed in her area of research. “It represents a major breakdown in the entire peer review process.” In particular, it may indicate flaws in peer review within legal academia. As experts of methods (including doctrinal analysis, legal interpretation, law-and-economics) or substantive areas (contracts, torts, property), legal academics are often expected to review writing in areas on which they are far from expert, involving historical contexts they have not studied and languages they do not know. This generalist approach, which makes legal academics capable of avoiding silos in a way that is intellectually stimulating, operates on trust in the diligence and rigor of the individual scholar. Following the Ramseyer episode, it may have to be reëvaluated.
For the wider world, however, why not simply ignore articles that are not factually supported? As Morris-Suzuki noted, there are “all sorts of strange articles out there, by all sorts of strange people.” But, in Ramseyer’s case, she said, “the fact that it’s by a Harvard professor gives it a degree of prominence and respectability, which makes it important to look at carefully.” Indeed, in the past weeks, I have heard from colleagues who said that they hadn’t known, until they read Ramseyer’s article, that the “conventional” story about comfort women was in question. Morris-Suzuki thinks this is a “really good test case” for the contemporary problem of people “being overwhelmed by things that present themselves as fact but are not properly based in fact”—not just in academia but in the media and on the Internet. Ramseyer has framed his work on comfort women as that of a debunker coming to refute what he called a “pure fiction” adopted by an academic consensus obsessed with the “trifecta” of “sexism, racism, and imperialism.”
Morris-Suzuki has produced a “study aid,” with Ramseyer’s comfort-women article as the case study, to teach students how to maintain principles of research integrity while also supporting free speech. It explains, “If there are no ground rules, then academic journals would have no basis for rejecting any paper submitted to them, and any statement of opinion—however lacking in logic or factual evidence—would have to be treated as equal to any other. We could then very easily end up spending much of the rest of our lives debating conspiracy theories or fake news which have no intellectual foundation whatever. To put it at its simplest and crudest, if there are no research standards, then we may as well all pack up and go home, because anything goes and any truth claim is just as good as any other.”
In Korea and Japan, controversies about comfort women are nothing new. What appears new is having a familiar extreme denialist position emanate from a university that many around the world associate with legitimate scholarship.
Daniel Sneider is a Korea and Japan expert at Stanford who studies how battles over wartime memory affect international relations in Asia. He has also covered Korea and Japan as a reporter in both countries since the nineteen-eighties. Sneider said that Ramseyer’s statements in Japan Forward are “precisely the arguments” of the “revisionist right in Japan.” Sneider told me that a high-ranking Japanese Foreign Ministry official cited Ramseyer’s work to him as “yet more evidence of the false nature of the Korean position.” According to Sneider, the Japanese official, after learning of the historians’ findings about Ramseyer’s article, assured him that the government does not intend to embrace Ramseyer’s contentions. But Sneider observed that “the more the Koreans go after Ramseyer, the more some people in Japan want to embrace him. It is a poisonous dynamic.” This week, a leading Japanese daily newspaper, Yukan Fuji, wrote that a Harvard professor’s scholarly research demonstrated that comfort women were licensed prostitutes, and that there was no sex slavery; it also claimed that crazed Koreans had pressured Harvard professors to criticize Ramseyer.
In the course of seventy-five fraught years, from the end of the Second World War and of Japanese colonialism to today, the Korean grievance that Japan has not sincerely taken responsibility for its actions has been yoked with the Japanese sense that Korea has repeatedly moved the goalposts and can never be satisfied. The Ramseyer controversy could not be more perfectly timed and ready-made to aggravate those dynamics, although I have no reason to believe it was done so by design. As I neared the end of this journey, I reached out to Ramseyer again to see if we could understand each other’s developing thoughts. By then, I’d spent much of the past month steeped in his sentences, logic, and sources—with hours of meticulous help from expert scholars of Japanese. He said he would pass and explain himself in his own time, which I could understand.
Alexis Dudden, the historian of Japan and Korea, was one of the scholars invited to publish a reply to Ramseyer in the journal. In her comment, she observes that a reason for studying past atrocities is to try to prevent similar occurrences in the future, “not to abuse history by weaponizing it for present purposes.” She told me of meeting Korean comfort women in Tokyo, in 2000, at the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery. “One of them had her tongue cut out,” she said. “Another woman literally lifted up her hanbok to show me where one of her breasts had been lopped off.” Dudden said that the tribunal was “a big watershed in terms of understanding how oral testimony really was necessary, to shift the legal approach but also in terms of doing historical evidence gathering” in the study of crimes against humanity. In some sense, such testimony of atrocities is seemingly irrefutable. But historians such as Dudden continually seek to verify it, producing knowledge of unspeakable horrors, through cycles of historical denial, political conflict, and diplomatic irresolution.
Last week, Lee Yong-soo, who was conscripted as a comfort woman at fifteen and is now in her nineties—known as Grandma Lee—spoke at an event organized by Harvard Law School’s Asian-American student group. In the days before, a small far-right fringe group in Korea sent multiple e-mails defending Ramseyer to me and all of my faculty colleagues at the law school and in East Asian studies, and also to students who’d criticized him. The mail I received focussed on my Korean ethnicity and asserted that my speaking about the matter while not being a law-and-economics specialist “will only prevent reasonable debates” and not help “resolve the conflict between Korea and Japan.” The e-mails even claimed that Grandma Lee was a “fake comfort woman,” and that we at Harvard should boycott her event. Grandma Lee chose to address the Ramseyer situation directly. Through an interpreter, she observed that Ramseyer was “maybe actually a blessing in disguise,” because, thanks to him, there is suddenly more interest in the history of comfort women. The more that Japan denies the history, she said, the more attention it brings. She said she hoped that, before she dies, Japan and Korea will work together to bring the matter to the International Court of Justice, so that the evidence could establish the truth of what happened. “I hate the crime but I don’t hate the people,” she said.
Jeannie Suk Gersen is a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a professor at Harvard Law School.
In the course of seventy-five fraught years, from the end of the Second World War and of Japanese colonialism to today, the Korean grievance that Japan has not sincerely taken responsibility for its actions has been yoked with the Japanese sense that Korea has repeatedly moved the goalposts and can never be satisfied. The Ramseyer controversy could not be more perfectly timed and ready-made to aggravate those dynamics, although I have no reason to believe it was done so by design. As I neared the end of this journey, I reached out to Ramseyer again to see if we could understand each other’s developing thoughts. By then, I’d spent much of the past month steeped in his sentences, logic, and sources—with hours of meticulous help from expert scholars of Japanese. He said he would pass and explain himself in his own time, which I could understand.
Alexis Dudden, the historian of Japan and Korea, was one of the scholars invited to publish a reply to Ramseyer in the journal. In her comment, she observes that a reason for studying past atrocities is to try to prevent similar occurrences in the future, “not to abuse history by weaponizing it for present purposes.” She told me of meeting Korean comfort women in Tokyo, in 2000, at the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery. “One of them had her tongue cut out,” she said. “Another woman literally lifted up her hanbok to show me where one of her breasts had been lopped off.” Dudden said that the tribunal was “a big watershed in terms of understanding how oral testimony really was necessary, to shift the legal approach but also in terms of doing historical evidence gathering” in the study of crimes against humanity. In some sense, such testimony of atrocities is seemingly irrefutable. But historians such as Dudden continually seek to verify it, producing knowledge of unspeakable horrors, through cycles of historical denial, political conflict, and diplomatic irresolution.
Last week, Lee Yong-soo, who was conscripted as a comfort woman at fifteen and is now in her nineties—known as Grandma Lee—spoke at an event organized by Harvard Law School’s Asian-American student group. In the days before, a small far-right fringe group in Korea sent multiple e-mails defending Ramseyer to me and all of my faculty colleagues at the law school and in East Asian studies, and also to students who’d criticized him. The mail I received focussed on my Korean ethnicity and asserted that my speaking about the matter while not being a law-and-economics specialist “will only prevent reasonable debates” and not help “resolve the conflict between Korea and Japan.” The e-mails even claimed that Grandma Lee was a “fake comfort woman,” and that we at Harvard should boycott her event. Grandma Lee chose to address the Ramseyer situation directly. Through an interpreter, she observed that Ramseyer was “maybe actually a blessing in disguise,” because, thanks to him, there is suddenly more interest in the history of comfort women. The more that Japan denies the history, she said, the more attention it brings. She said she hoped that, before she dies, Japan and Korea will work together to bring the matter to the International Court of Justice, so that the evidence could establish the truth of what happened. “I hate the crime but I don’t hate the people,” she said.
Jeannie Suk Gersen is a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a professor at Harvard Law School.
No comments:
Post a Comment