An Open Letter to Mark Ramseyer
By SeongHan Kim | Posted on April 19, 2021
Kim SeongHan is Representative for MCC Northeast Asia and a member of Jesus Heart Mennonite Church, Republic of Korea. This open letter responds to an opinion piece by Harvard Law School professor Mark Ramseyer claiming that World War II-era Korean “comfort women,” who were forced into sex work by the Japanese military, were actually exercising their free, rational choice to sell their labor. Ramseyer’s argument, which he also developed in an academic article, has caused intense anger in Korea and around the world. Ramseyer was reared by American Mennonite missionaries in Japan. For additional background, see Jeannie Suk Gersen’s coverage in The New Yorker (link).
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History is somewhat distant. But when one finds the space of your little story in a more extensive history, the color of history begins to change.
I am not a historian, but I know how my family survived during the Japanese colonization era (1910—1945). My grandfather was involved in the independence movement in the 1920s, and he was imprisoned for several years. He passed away in 1966 before I was born, but I heard that he suffered from the aftereffects of torture until he passed away. However, the sad story that concerns me here is about my aunt. My aunt (my father’s only sister) was forced to marry [1] at age sixteen to avoid the national mobilization for labor (it’s possible she would have been forced to become a comfort woman). Her father, who was fighting against Imperial Japan, could not allow them to take away his only daughter. Not surprisingly, this unwanted marriage did not go well. They divorced later, and my grandfather put my aunt’s daughter on his family register as his daughter. My aunt needed a fresh start.
I know this is too personal and too detailed. However, this is one story behind the larger story of the comfort-women-sex-slave story during the Imperial Japanese colonization, which Mark Ramseyer claims is a pure fiction.
While working with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in Northeast Asia as a peace educator, I have had the privileged to join several international gatherings and trainings in the region—the Northeast Asia Reconciliation Initiative (NARI) and Northeast Asia Regional Peace-Building Institute (NARPI). NARI is a Christian gathering from the region. Theologians, nuns, pastors, and activists stay together and learn from each other about reconciliation for a week. NARPI is an intensive peacebuilding training for people who want to engage in peace work in Northeast Asia. MCC has been deeply involved in these regional peacebuilding efforts from the beginning. Although these two programs serve a different group of people, Christians or not, there is an important common feature: the pilgrimage (NARI) and the field trip (NARPI).
When NARI gathered in Nagasaki in 2015, they pilgrimaged to atomic bomb sites, and a small museum focused on Japanese military atrocities. Many participants recall that as a turning point in their life. They finally saw different narratives from other countries, and this was possible because they walked together, even in a difficult place.
In August 14, 2019, I went to Nanjing for a NARPI training. As a field trip, we visited the Comfort Women Museum in Nanjing. I was stunned when I found a small crucifix in the small room dedicated to Lei Guiyang, a comfort woman from Nanjing. I do not know why the crucifix was there. Was she Christian? But, because of that crucifix, I can make a connection between the story of Lei Guiyang and Mary’s Magnificat. It was the day before the Assumption of Mary.
When I read Ramseyer’s article on Japan Forward, “Recovering the Truth about the Comfort Women,” I felt hurt. Ramseyer said that comfort women voluntarily joined the wartime sex business [2] hoping for a great reward with great risk-taking. However, my simple question is that if they all voluntarily became comfort women, why would my aunt be forced to marry [1] at age sixteen and suffer the consequences? The article is also hurting people committed to making peace and reconciliation in Northeast Asia.
I want to invite Ramseyer to join a pilgrimage with other Christian sisters and brothers in Northeast Asia. We may learn from each other. When we walk together into the most difficult place, we will see differently and hear differently.
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Cheryl Miller says:
We just saw on PBS a documentary of Korean women requesting the Japanese government to apologize for the abuse of Korean women. Their request has been made for many years and the Japanese government has not apologized.
April 20, 2021
1:56 pm
Reply
Jamie Pitts says:
Hello Cheryl, the link to the New Yorker article in paragraph before the letter specifies what the Japanese government has and hasn’t done, and steps taken by previous governments that have been undermined by later governments. In short, there were apologies in 1993 and 2015, but the circumstances of the more recent one are complex and the government’s attitude since the early 2000s has been unapologetic.
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Recovering the Truth about the Comfort Women
As academics, we are used to dealing with exaggerations. We are not used to finding that the story is pure fiction. But that is the nature of the comfort-women-sex-slave story.
Mark RamseyerPublished 3 months ago on January 12, 2021
By Mark Ramseyer
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Innovators in Japan are Developing New Technologies to Counter Coronavirus
It’s been a bizarrely unending story.
Elderly Korean women claim to have been forced at Japanese bayonet-point to work as sex slaves. The Japanese government replies that the Korean government waived claims like this by treaty in 1965. But it expresses sympathy anyway, and offers more money. Koreans still complain. The Japanese government apologizes again, offers more money, and the Korean government promises never to raise the question again. Then a new political party takes power, declares the Japanese apology insincere, and starts the process all over again.
Expressing sympathy to elderly women who have had a rough life is fine. Paying money to an ally in order to rebuild a stable relationship is fine.
But the claims about enslaved Korean comfort women are historically untrue. The Japanese army did not dragoon Korean women to work in its brothels. It did not use Korean women as sex slaves. The claims to the contrary are simply ー factually ー false.
The Contracts
During the 1930s, the Japanese military decided it needed brothels that would agree to keep the risk of venereal disease in check. It was not short of prostitutes. Prostitutes follow armies everywhere, and they followed the Japanese army in Asia.
But many of the prostitutes that followed its army had venereal disease. For an army, disease can be debilitating. To maintain an effective military force, the army needed brothels that required condom usage, that required prostitutes and clients to use disinfectant after every encounter, and that required their prostitutes to undergo weekly health examinations.
Hence, the army proposed a system: if a brothel agreed to these terms, it would designate it a “comfort station,” and prohibit its soldiers from patronizing any competing installations.
To hire Korean prostitutes, the brothels used variations on the contracts that the licensed prostitutes used within Japan. Prostitution is obviously dangerous and unpleasant. Even women otherwise interested in the job take it only if the pay is high enough to compensate for those dangers and difficulties and for the reputational hit they will incur. A brothel owner can promise a woman that she will earn high pay, but he has an incentive to lie, and she knows he has an incentive to lie. He can offer her a fixed wage, but then she will have an incentive to shirk. After all, she works in an unmonitored setting. If she is sufficiently unpleasant that no one asks for her at the front desk, so much the better.
The brothels and prostitutes solved these problems by coupling a high up-front payment with a maximum service term that the prostitute could reduce by working hard. More specifically, Tokyo brothels paid new prostitutes an upfront fee that typically ranged from 1000 to 1200 yen. In addition, it paid her room, board, and a fraction of the revenues she generated.
She agreed to work for a maximum of (usually) six years, and the brothel agreed to let her quit early if she generated enough revenue to repay the advance before that. The stereotype that brothels manipulated accounts to keep the women locked in “debt-slavery” is simply not true. Most Tokyo prostitutes paid back their advances early and quit in about three years.
Licensed prostitutes in pre-war Korea used similar contracts. Typically, they served under three-year-maximum contracts rather than the six in Japan. As in Japan, most left the industry by their mid-20s.
Other Korean women worked as unlicensed prostitutes. And even before the Japanese military began its comfort-station network, Korean women fanned out on their own across Asia to work as prostitutes.
Working at a comfort station in war-torn China or Southeast Asia was a more dangerous job than working in Seoul. There was the risk of war. There was a much higher risk of disease. And should the brothel prove abusive, a prostitute would find it harder to leave the brothel and fade into the comfortable anonymity of a Korean city. To take these jobs, the Korean women demanded and received very high pay. They worked shorter terms ー typically two years. Until the last months of the war, they repaid the advances and went home.
The ‘Asahi Shimbun’ Debacle
The claim that the Japanese army coerced Korean women into working in comfort stations dates to the 1980s. In 1982, a writer named Seiji Yoshida began talking about “comfort women hunts” he had led. He gave lectures, and soon incorporated the stories into what he styled a memoir. “My War Crimes,” he called it. He had worked from 1942 in a labor office in Yamaguchi. There, he had supervised the work of mobilizing Korean workers. In May of 1943, he wrote, his office received an order to recruit 2000 Korean workers. More pointedly, it received an order to acquire 200 Koreans to work as “comfort women.”
With nine soldiers, Yoshida continued, he went to the island of Jeju. There, he led “comfort women hunts.” In a typical account, he recalled finding a compound where 20-30 women worked. He and his team went in with guns. When the women started screaming, nearby Korean men came running. He and his team grabbed the women by their arms, however, and dragged them off. The mob soon grew to over 100, but Yoshida’s soldiers drew their bayonets and held them at bay. They loaded the women into the truck, drove 5 or 6 km, and then stopped for a half hour to rape them. The military transported the women to the harbor and loaded them onto its ships ー hands tied, and each woman bound to the next.
In fact, Yoshida had invented the story. The Asahi Shimbun newspaper gave it flamboyant coverage, but several historians questioned it from the start.
Ikuhiko Hata was among the first to doubt the account, and traveled to Jeju to investigate. He found the village where Yoshida claimed to have conducted one of the larger hunts, but no one remembered anything about a raid. This is a small place, one elderly man told him. If the Japanese military had abducted women to serve as prostitutes, no one would forget it.
Other historians and reporters ー both Japanese and Korean ー followed. Yoshida initially insisted that the events had occurred. He started avoiding reporters and scholars, however, and eventually admitted to having fabricated the book. By the mid-1990s, scholars had dismissed Yoshida’s account as fiction. Eventually, even the Asahi Shimbun retracted its stories.
The Chong Dae Hyup
One organization lies at the heart of the current dispute, and it is an organization that manipulates the dispute in relentless opposition to reconciliation with Japan. The organization is the Chong Dae Hyup (CDH), the “Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery.” The CDH organizes weekly protests in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. It began the installation of comfort women statues around the world. It pressured the former comfort women to reject the compensation offered by Japan. And it brutally attacks Korean scholars who would question the “sex-slave” narrative.
CDH controls most of the public testimony by the comfort women. It maintains its ability to do this by collaborating in the operation of a nursing home ー the House of Nanum ー for the women who tell the stories it wants reported. Only a small subset of the comfort women recount the autobiographies on which the conventional Western account depends, and these are the women that the CDH promotes.
Several of these women have changed their stories in dramatic ways. When they first identified themselves as comfort women, they told of having taken the jobs on their own, or of having been sold into prostitution by their parents. As the movement began to extract money from the Japanese government, they changed their stories. Now they told of being forced into the job by the military, and that is the story that the CDH has promoted.
By sabotaging any reconciliation between South Korea and Japan, the CDH directly promotes a key North Korean political goal ー and that seems to be the point. Initially organized by Korean communists, the group was at one time designated by the South Korean government as a North Korean affiliate.
As academics, we are used to dealing with exaggerations. If someone recounts a story that sounds bizarre, we assume the truth must be more modest. It usually is. We are not used to finding that the story is pure fiction. But that is the nature of the comfort-women-sex-slave story.
Within Korea, the story fairly obviously struck a nationalistic chord. Within Japan, it fed a long-standing opposition among professors to the Liberal Democratic Party and its plans for the Self-Defense Force. And within the western academy, it fit the triple “narratives” of racism, imperialism, and sexism currently so fashionable in some departments.
Yet pure fiction it is.
Author: J. Mark Ramseyer
Find other articles by the author on JAPAN Forward, at this link.
Other Articles related to this debate:
Some Uncomfortable Truths About Comfort Women for the International Mob
Rabble-Rousers Go on Witch Hunt vs Harvard Professor Who Challenges ‘Sex Slaves’ Theory
What Miki Dezaki and I Have in Common: Speaking Up for Mark Ramseyer
Bad History on the Comfort Women
[Bookmark] Controversy over Harvard Thesis on Comfort Women Foretells the Decline of ‘Anti-Japanese Tribalism’
[Bookmark] Harvard Professor’s Paper on Comfort Women Will Become Academia’s Pandora’s Box
