Books
INTERVIEW | On the 'The Comfort Women Hoax' with Mark Ramseyer and Jason Morgan
The authors offered a glimpse into their new book on the deeper problems behind the comfort women issue and the somber realities of American higher education.
Published 8 months ago
on February 23, 2024
By Kenji Yoshida
Professor J Mark Ramseyer (upper left) and Professor Jason Morgan (upper right) in an online interview with JAPAN Forward reporter Kenji Yoshida (lower frame).American universities are increasingly estranging from liberal values, cherishing conformity over heterodoxy. Suppression of ideas occurs on a range of topics, not just domestic political issues but even on the historical discourse surrounding Asian history, like the comfort women issue.
The consequence of such suppression jeopardizes two foundations of academia: open debate and academic freedom. Those who dare challenge the norm have repeatedly fallen victim to wokeism.
Two academics, however, have refused to bend to such institutional pressures from the ivory tower. They are J Mark Ramseyer of Harvard Law School and Jason Morgan of Reitaku University.
Their pursuit of truth in the face of fierce resistance is penned in the freshly printed book, The Comfort Women Hoax: A Fake Memoir, North Korean Spies, and Hit Squads in the Academic Swamp (Encounter Books, 2024).
In an interview with JAPAN Forward, the authors offered a glimpse into their new book and the somber realities of American higher education.
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Excerpts follow.
The McGraw-Hill Textbook Controversy
This controversy is about a passage on comfort women in a McGraw-Hill textbook published in 2015. The textbook authors Herbert Ziegler and Jerry Bentley wrote that 200,000 women were forcibly recruited as comfort women by the Japanese imperial army. Then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe publicly contested the claim, adding to the textbook's notoriety.
Allow me to start by asking how you first met each other.
Morgan: Everyone studying Japanese Law knew or at least had an idea of who Mark was. I also knew Mark to be a realist scholar who works from facts on the ground. [And] I always admired him because he viewed the Japanese as regular people without invoking any cultural theories or biases.
I don't know if you remember, but when the controversy over the 2015 McGraw-Hill textbook broke out, I wrote a letter to the American Historical Association pointing out its errors. The letter was then released on their online bulletin. Mark read it and sent me a warm email of support. That was the first time I ever communicated with him.
Ramseyer: As I recall, the Japanese Consul General in Hawaii visited Ziegler during his "office hours" to inquire about the passage. Western specialists on Japanese history attacked the visit as an assault on academic freedom. Then, 19 historians in Japan wrote to point out that the passage in the textbook was preposterous and that serious academics in Japan knew so. The historians further argued that Western scholars could pretend that they were "standing with Japanese historians" if they wished, but they were actually standing alone.
That's when I heard about Jason. Some of my colleagues in Japan told me about a petition that was going around among academics in support of the McGraw-Hill textbook. I remember reading Jason's letter to the AHA and discussing it with my Japanese colleagues. They told me Jason was a graduate student studying legal history in Tokyo.
What was your impression of the controversy at the time?
The petition itself was a real embarrassment to the American academy. That textbook passage was just plain silly, and yet here were all these famous senior American historians – nominally specialists in Japanese history – defending it. It was so encouraging that a graduate student in the field stood up to them. Incredible courage was needed for someone like Jason to stand up to these historians.
The Uncomfortable Comfort Women Contracts
For those who are unfamiliar, Professor Ramseyer's 2021 paper contested conventional comfort women narratives. He argued that comfort women were not wartime sex slaves but women who entered into contractual relationships with comfort station owners.
A new book on comfort women was published on January 23. What led to writing this new book?
Ramseyer: The disaster surrounding my "Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War" hit in February of 2021. It was a long year for me. Actually, three long years. But somehow I survived. During that time, I wrote a rebuttal to my critics and was preparing another paper dealing with the comfort women issue and its connection to North Korea.
Friends here in the United States suggested I write an article about the whole controversy. But explaining the comfort women history and the evidence debunking conventional narratives was a book-length project. So, authoring a book seemed like the only option.
Cover image of
How did you end up co authoring the book with Dr Morgan?
Ramseyer: I'm a senior academic, and Jason is a very new academic. For our readership, we hope it includes young people considering entering the teaching profession. And I thought they would find hearing about Jason's experience extremely interesting. So that led me to contact Jason to collaborate on this project in early 2022.
While reading the book, I couldn't but be taken aback at the degree to which established academics will go to destroy another academic's career. Dr Morgan, your episode with your graduate school advisors was quite surprising.
Morgan: Yes. Right around the time I began publicly contesting comfort women's abducted-at-bayonet-point and sexual enslavement theories, Louise Young, my graduate school advisor at the University of Wisconsin, informed me that she was dropping me as a student. By then, I was already working on a letter to the American Historical Association noting the flaws in Ziegler and Bentley's textbook.
She had passed me off to her junior colleague, Sarah Thal, without giving any serious reason. Later, through filing a Freedom of Information Act request, I discovered that Louise, Thal, and other academics were very displeased about my views on comfort women.
I was on a Fulbright at the time. Louise even got my home university to contact Matthew Sussman, the director of the Fulbright program in Japan, who duly brought me in and gave me a dressing down for speaking in public about the comfort women.
For Louise, I was increasingly becoming a loose cannon. When I went to study at Waseda University in Japan and began speaking out in defiance of the sex-slave narrative that she and her thousands of colleagues had spent their careers curating, it was the final straw for her. She knew that I could not be tamed to become the kind of tailormade, conformist academic she wished me to be. She stepped aside and had me blacklisted, all while smiling to my face and pretending to value academic freedom.
Dr Ramseyer, you also faced a fair share of injustice yourself. Some academics labeled you racist, while others called you a white supremacist and Holocaust denier. Were you surprised by the barrage of attacks?
Ramseyer: Surprised? I was shocked. What did any of this have to do with "white supremacy"? And what did it have to do with the Holocaust? Besides, I'm an old guy. I've been around for a long time. And I thought people knew who I was. It was just inconceivable that anybody who knew me thought I would back down when I was obviously just telling the truth.
I can't be sure, but I think Andrew Gordon initiated the whole movement to have my 2021 comfort women paper retracted. And the Quintet (five leading critics of Ramseyer) carried on. Two of them, Amy Stanley and Hannah Shepherd, were former students of his.
But these critics obviously had no clue what kind of person I was. I have a reputation for being something of a pitbull of a scholar. If I think I'm right, I don't back down. In print, I'm a nasty guy. Did they really think I was going to let them get away with this? I was flummoxed.
Morgan: Listening to what you just said, maybe Gordon saw it as an opportunity to get rid of a pest, someone who had been debunking his nonsense for decades. Gordon might have thought he had a decent chance if he could rile up enough people. After all, the comfort women issue is a perfect "intersectional" narrative.
Where are the Intellectuals?
Yoshida: In fact, I also had an encounter with three of your main critics, Gordon, Amy Stanley, and Jin-hee Lee. In the summer of 2021, I drafted a petition calling for the acquittal of Lew Seok-choon the former Yonsei University professor indicted for denying abducted-at-bayonet-point theory in his lecture. ) I wanted to recruit signatures from academics in the US.
Unsurprisingly, the three professors refused to sign. Stanley claimed the petition was "terrible" and seemed offended that I even asked. Lee went on to contact other signatories of the petition, persuading them to rescind their support for Lew.
Morgan: To raise a little larger point, there are very few intellectuals in academia nowadays. Very few people know what an idea is and how to deal with it. Instead of discussing things, they get "offended" and then go on harassment campaigns. But this was the whole point of Aristotle's work. To entertain ideas in the mind without having a fistfight over it. Go to graduate school nowadays: nobody reads Aristotle. Instead, they read intersectional feminist-Marxist agitprop and call it "rigorous scholarship."
STEM Studies Versus Humanities
Morgan: What do you think, Mark? Do you think people just lost the ability to live and let live?
Ramseyer: It probably varies by field. American STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) are still solid. There are a lot of independent scholars in the law schools. But there aren't many in the humanities departments. If you want to read a wide variety of scholarships, then you're not going to want to pursue a PhD in the humanities. [And] if you want to think broadly about social issues, you don't want to be in the humanities.
The result is that students self-select. Students interested in a classic liberal arts education stay away from the humanities. It wasn't always like this, and it wasn't like this when I went to college in the 1970s. But after the 1980s, the humanities in the West spiraled down the drain really fast.
Takeaways
What do you hope readers take away from your new book?
Jason: History is messy! And there are almost no intellectuals left in American universities to study it. People who want to learn Asian history should read books by real scholars in Korea and Japan.
Ramseyer: If you're wrong, admit it and move on. But if you're right, don't back down. Don't ever back down. Ever. And if you see a colleague being attacked, help him out. Help her out. We've got to stand together. Jason's the one who knows Latin. Ask him. But I think the phrase is "illegitimis non carborundum."
RELATED:
Interview by: Kenji Yoshida
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Stay Woke
The new sense of 'woke' is gaining popularity
What to Know
Woke is now defined in this dictionary as “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice),” and identified as U.S. slang. It originated in African American English and gained more widespread use beginning in 2014 as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. By the end of that same decade it was also being applied by some as a general pejorative for anyone who is or appears to be politically left-leaning.
Update: This word was added in September 2017.
If you frequent social media, you may well have seen posts or tweets about current events that are tagged #staywoke. Woke is a slang term that is easing into the mainstream from some varieties of a dialect called African American Vernacular English (sometimes called AAVE). In AAVE, awake is often rendered as woke, as in, “I was sleeping, but now I’m woke.”
'Woke' is increasingly used as a byword for social awareness.
It can be hard to trace slang back to its origins since slang’s origins are usually spoken, and it can be particularly difficult to trace a slang word that has its origins in a dialect. Woke’s transformation into a byword of social awareness likely started decades earlier but began to be more broadly known in 2008, with the release of Erykah Badu’s song “Master Teacher”:
Even if yo baby ain't got no money
To support ya baby, you
(I stay woke)
Even when the preacher tell you some lies
And cheatin on ya mama, you stay woke
(I stay woke)
Even though you go through struggle and strife
To keep a healthy life, I stay woke
(I stay woke)
Everybody knows a black or a white there's creatures in every shape and size
Everybody
(I stay woke)
Stay woke became a watch word in parts of the black community for those who were self-aware, questioning the dominant paradigm and striving for something better. But stay woke and woke became part of a wider discussion in 2014, immediately following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The word woke became entwined with the Black Lives Matter movement; instead of just being a word that signaled awareness of injustice or racial tension, it became a word of action. Activists were woke and called on others to stay woke.
Like many other terms from black culture that have been taken into the mainstream, woke is gaining broader uses. It’s now seeing use as an adjective to refer to places where woke people commune: woke Twitter has very recently taken off as the shorthand for describing social-media activists. The broader uses of woke are still very much in flux, and there are some who are woke to the broader implications of woke:
“Woke” feels a little bit like Macklemore rapping in one of his latest tracks about how his whiteness makes his rap music more acceptable to other white people. The conundrum is built in. When white people aspire to get points for consciousness, they walk right into the cross hairs between allyship and appropriation.
—Amanda Hess, New York Times, 16 Apr. 2016
Words We're Watching talks about words we are increasingly seeing in use but that have not yet met our criteria for entry.
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The McGraw-Hill Textbook Controversy
This controversy is about a passage on comfort women in a McGraw-Hill textbook published in 2015. The textbook authors Herbert Ziegler and Jerry Bentley wrote that 200,000 women were forcibly recruited as comfort women by the Japanese imperial army. Then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe publicly contested the claim, adding to the textbook's notoriety.
Allow me to start by asking how you first met each other.
Morgan: Everyone studying Japanese Law knew or at least had an idea of who Mark was. I also knew Mark to be a realist scholar who works from facts on the ground. [And] I always admired him because he viewed the Japanese as regular people without invoking any cultural theories or biases.
I don't know if you remember, but when the controversy over the 2015 McGraw-Hill textbook broke out, I wrote a letter to the American Historical Association pointing out its errors. The letter was then released on their online bulletin. Mark read it and sent me a warm email of support. That was the first time I ever communicated with him.
Ramseyer: As I recall, the Japanese Consul General in Hawaii visited Ziegler during his "office hours" to inquire about the passage. Western specialists on Japanese history attacked the visit as an assault on academic freedom. Then, 19 historians in Japan wrote to point out that the passage in the textbook was preposterous and that serious academics in Japan knew so. The historians further argued that Western scholars could pretend that they were "standing with Japanese historians" if they wished, but they were actually standing alone.
That's when I heard about Jason. Some of my colleagues in Japan told me about a petition that was going around among academics in support of the McGraw-Hill textbook. I remember reading Jason's letter to the AHA and discussing it with my Japanese colleagues. They told me Jason was a graduate student studying legal history in Tokyo.
What was your impression of the controversy at the time?
The petition itself was a real embarrassment to the American academy. That textbook passage was just plain silly, and yet here were all these famous senior American historians – nominally specialists in Japanese history – defending it. It was so encouraging that a graduate student in the field stood up to them. Incredible courage was needed for someone like Jason to stand up to these historians.
The Uncomfortable Comfort Women Contracts
For those who are unfamiliar, Professor Ramseyer's 2021 paper contested conventional comfort women narratives. He argued that comfort women were not wartime sex slaves but women who entered into contractual relationships with comfort station owners.
A new book on comfort women was published on January 23. What led to writing this new book?
Ramseyer: The disaster surrounding my "Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War" hit in February of 2021. It was a long year for me. Actually, three long years. But somehow I survived. During that time, I wrote a rebuttal to my critics and was preparing another paper dealing with the comfort women issue and its connection to North Korea.
Friends here in the United States suggested I write an article about the whole controversy. But explaining the comfort women history and the evidence debunking conventional narratives was a book-length project. So, authoring a book seemed like the only option.
Cover image of Ramseyer and Morgan's new book. (Published by Encounter Books)
How did you end up co authoring the book with Dr Morgan?
Ramseyer: I'm a senior academic, and Jason is a very new academic. For our readership, we hope it includes young people considering entering the teaching profession. And I thought they would find hearing about Jason's experience extremely interesting. So that led me to contact Jason to collaborate on this project in early 2022.
While reading the book, I couldn't but be taken aback at the degree to which established academics will go to destroy another academic's career. Dr Morgan, your episode with your graduate school advisors was quite surprising.
Morgan: Yes. Right around the time I began publicly contesting comfort women's abducted-at-bayonet-point and sexual enslavement theories, Louise Young, my graduate school advisor at the University of Wisconsin, informed me that she was dropping me as a student. By then, I was already working on a letter to the American Historical Association noting the flaws in Ziegler and Bentley's textbook.
She had passed me off to her junior colleague, Sarah Thal, without giving any serious reason. Later, through filing a Freedom of Information Act request, I discovered that Louise, Thal, and other academics were very displeased about my views on comfort women.
I was on a Fulbright at the time. Louise even got my home university to contact Matthew Sussman, the director of the Fulbright program in Japan, who duly brought me in and gave me a dressing down for speaking in public about the comfort women.
For Louise, I was increasingly becoming a loose cannon. When I went to study at Waseda University in Japan and began speaking out in defiance of the sex-slave narrative that she and her thousands of colleagues had spent their careers curating, it was the final straw for her. She knew that I could not be tamed to become the kind of tailormade, conformist academic she wished me to be. She stepped aside and had me blacklisted, all while smiling to my face and pretending to value academic freedom.
Dr Ramseyer, you also faced a fair share of injustice yourself. Some academics labeled you racist, while others called you a white supremacist and Holocaust denier. Were you surprised by the barrage of attacks?
Ramseyer: Surprised? I was shocked. What did any of this have to do with "white supremacy"? And what did it have to do with the Holocaust? Besides, I'm an old guy. I've been around for a long time. And I thought people knew who I was. It was just inconceivable that anybody who knew me thought I would back down when I was obviously just telling the truth.
I can't be sure, but I think Andrew Gordon initiated the whole movement to have my 2021 comfort women paper retracted. And the Quintet (five leading critics of Ramseyer) carried on. Two of them, Amy Stanley and Hannah Shepherd, were former students of his.
But these critics obviously had no clue what kind of person I was. I have a reputation for being something of a pitbull of a scholar. If I think I'm right, I don't back down. In print, I'm a nasty guy. Did they really think I was going to let them get away with this? I was flummoxed.
Morgan: Listening to what you just said, maybe Gordon saw it as an opportunity to get rid of a pest, someone who had been debunking his nonsense for decades. Gordon might have thought he had a decent chance if he could rile up enough people. After all, the comfort women issue is a perfect "intersectional" narrative.
Where are the Intellectuals?
Yoshida: In fact, I also had an encounter with three of your main critics, Gordon, Amy Stanley, and Jin-hee Lee. In the summer of 2021, I drafted a petition calling for the acquittal of Lew Seok-choon the former Yonsei University professor indicted for denying abducted-at-bayonet-point theory in his lecture. ) I wanted to recruit signatures from academics in the US.
Unsurprisingly, the three professors refused to sign. Stanley claimed the petition was "terrible" and seemed offended that I even asked. Lee went on to contact other signatories of the petition, persuading them to rescind their support for Lew.
Morgan: To raise a little larger point, there are very few intellectuals in academia nowadays. Very few people know what an idea is and how to deal with it. Instead of discussing things, they get "offended" and then go on harassment campaigns. But this was the whole point of Aristotle's work. To entertain ideas in the mind without having a fistfight over it. Go to graduate school nowadays: nobody reads Aristotle. Instead, they read intersectional feminist-Marxist agitprop and call it "rigorous scholarship."
STEM Studies Versus Humanities
Morgan: What do you think, Mark? Do you think people just lost the ability to live and let live?
Ramseyer: It probably varies by field. American STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) are still solid. There are a lot of independent scholars in the law schools. But there aren't many in the humanities departments. If you want to read a wide variety of scholarships, then you're not going to want to pursue a PhD in the humanities. [And] if you want to think broadly about social issues, you don't want to be in the humanities.
The result is that students self-select. Students interested in a classic liberal arts education stay away from the humanities. It wasn't always like this, and it wasn't like this when I went to college in the 1970s. But after the 1980s, the humanities in the West spiraled down the drain really fast.
Takeaways
What do you hope readers take away from your new book?
Jason: History is messy! And there are almost no intellectuals left in American universities to study it. People who want to learn Asian history should read books by real scholars in Korea and Japan.
Ramseyer: If you're wrong, admit it and move on. But if you're right, don't back down. Don't ever back down. Ever. And if you see a colleague being attacked, help him out. Help her out. We've got to stand together. Jason's the one who knows Latin. Ask him. But I think the phrase is "illegitimis non carborundum."
RELATED:
Interview by: Kenji Yoshida
===
[BOOK 인터뷰| #마크_램지어 #제이슨_모건 과 함께하는 '#위안부_사기극에_관하여
저자들은 위안부 문제의 근본적인 문제와 미국 고등교육의 암울한 현실을 다룬 새 책을 통해 엿볼 수 있는 기회를 제공했다.
미국 대학들은 점점 자유주의적 가치에서 멀어지고 있으며, 이단 보다 순응을 중시하고 있다. 사상 억압은 국내 정치 문제뿐만 아니라 위안부 문제 와 같은 아시아 역사를 둘러싼 역사적 담론에서도 다양한 주제로 발생한다 .
그러한 억압의 결과는 학문의 두 가지 기반, 즉 열린 토론과 학문의 자유를 위태롭게 한다 . 규범에 도전하는 사람들은 반복적으로 깨어 있는 사람들의 희생양이 되었다.
그러나 두 명의 학자는 상아탑에서 그런 제도적 압력에 굴복하는 것을 거부했다. 그들은 하버드 로스쿨 의 J 마크 램지어 와 레이타쿠 대학의 제이슨 모건 이다 .
격렬한 저항에 직면하여 진실을 추구한 그들의 노력은 새로 인쇄된 책, <위안부 사기: 가짜 회고록, 북한 스파이, 그리고 학문의 늪 속의 암살단> (인카운터북스, 2024년)에 담겨 있다.
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Stay Woke
The new sense of 'woke' is gaining popularity
What to Know
Woke is now defined in this dictionary as “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice),” and identified as U.S. slang. It originated in African American English and gained more widespread use beginning in 2014 as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. By the end of that same decade it was also being applied by some as a general pejorative for anyone who is or appears to be politically left-leaning.
Update: This word was added in September 2017.
If you frequent social media, you may well have seen posts or tweets about current events that are tagged #staywoke. Woke is a slang term that is easing into the mainstream from some varieties of a dialect called African American Vernacular English (sometimes called AAVE). In AAVE, awake is often rendered as woke, as in, “I was sleeping, but now I’m woke.”
'Woke' is increasingly used as a byword for social awareness.
It can be hard to trace slang back to its origins since slang’s origins are usually spoken, and it can be particularly difficult to trace a slang word that has its origins in a dialect. Woke’s transformation into a byword of social awareness likely started decades earlier but began to be more broadly known in 2008, with the release of Erykah Badu’s song “Master Teacher”:
Even if yo baby ain't got no money
To support ya baby, you
(I stay woke)
Even when the preacher tell you some lies
And cheatin on ya mama, you stay woke
(I stay woke)
Even though you go through struggle and strife
To keep a healthy life, I stay woke
(I stay woke)
Everybody knows a black or a white there's creatures in every shape and size
Everybody
(I stay woke)
Stay woke became a watch word in parts of the black community for those who were self-aware, questioning the dominant paradigm and striving for something better. But stay woke and woke became part of a wider discussion in 2014, immediately following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The word woke became entwined with the Black Lives Matter movement; instead of just being a word that signaled awareness of injustice or racial tension, it became a word of action. Activists were woke and called on others to stay woke.
Like many other terms from black culture that have been taken into the mainstream, woke is gaining broader uses. It’s now seeing use as an adjective to refer to places where woke people commune: woke Twitter has very recently taken off as the shorthand for describing social-media activists. The broader uses of woke are still very much in flux, and there are some who are woke to the broader implications of woke:
“Woke” feels a little bit like Macklemore rapping in one of his latest tracks about how his whiteness makes his rap music more acceptable to other white people. The conundrum is built in. When white people aspire to get points for consciousness, they walk right into the cross hairs between allyship and appropriation.
—Amanda Hess, New York Times, 16 Apr. 2016
Words We're Watching talks about words we are increasingly seeing in use but that have not yet met our criteria for entry.
===
Louise Young
Professor of History
608.263.1829
Office: 4102 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 4022 Mosse Humanities
Office Hours: TBA
Biography
I am a social and cultural historian of modern Japan. My research and teaching interests include Japanese international relations, World War Two in Asia, comparative imperialism, and urban history. I am currently working on two book projects. The Idea of Class in Modern Japan is a social and intellectual history of the transition from a feudal status system to a modern class hierarchy, 1860-1940. Rethinking Japanese Imperialism examines Japan in the world as a history of the present, tracing this history from the forced opening of the Japanese market in the mid nineteenth century to the current conjuncture, with the rise of neo-nationalisms in Asia and the challenge to the neo-liberal world order.
Professor Young is not currently accepting incoming graduate students for academic year 2025-26.
Education
Ph.D., Columbia University
M.A., Columbia University
B.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison
Books
Louise Young. Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan. University of California Press, 2013.
Louise Young. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. University of California Press, 1998.
Selected Publications
- “When Fascism Met Empire in Japanese-occupied Manchuria,” (pdf) in special issue on Axis Empires: toward a global history of fascist imperialism, Journal of Global History, Vol.12, no. 2 (June 2017): 274-296.
- “Rethinking Empire in the Twentieth Century: Lessons from Imperial and Post-imperial Japan,” (pdf) in The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire, eds., Andrew Thompson and Martin Thomas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
- “Urban Life and the City Idea in the Twentieth Century,” in Handbook of Modern Japanese History, eds., Christopher W.A. Szpilman and Sven Saalar. London: Routledge, 2017.
- “Japan’s New International History,” (pdf) introduction to AHR Forum: Early- Twentieth-Century Japan in a Global Context, American Historical Review, 119, 4 (October 2014): 1117-1129.
- “Ideologies of Difference and the Turn to Atrocity: Japan’s War on China,” in A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937-1945, eds., Roger Chickering, Stig Forster, and Berndt Greiner. London: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- “Japan at War: History-writing on the Crisis of the 1930s”, in The Origins of the Second World War, Reconsidered (Rev. ed., Routledge 1999).
- “Marketing the Modern: Department Stores, Consumer Culture and the New Middle Class in Interwar Japan”, in International Labor and Working-Class History (No. 55, Spring 1999)
Advisor To
History Courses
- History 104 – Introduction to East Asian History: Japan – Syllabus 2017 (pdf)
- History 200 – Historical Studies: The Atomic Bomb in American and Japanese History – Syllabus 2021 (pdf)
- History 201 – The Historian’s Craft: How Do Empires End? Defeat, Occupation and Post-Imperial Japan – Syllabus 2021 (pdf)
- History 455 – Japans Modern Century, 1853-1952: Rise & Fall of the Imperial State
- History 456 – Japan and World War Two in Asia – Syllabus 2020 (pdf)
- History 500 – Reading Seminar: Japanese Imperialism – Syllabus 2023 (pdf)
- History 500 – Reading Seminar: The Atomic Bomb in American and Japanese History – Syllabus 2021 (pdf)
- History 600 – Militarism and Fascism in Japan – Syllabus 2007 (pdf)
- History 600 – Japanese Urbanism – Syllabus 2011 (pdf)
- History 680/690 – Honors Thesis Colloquium
- History 703 – History and Theory
- History 710 – Professional Development Seminar – Grant Writing Proposals – Syllabus 2023 (pdf)
- History 725 – Seminar in East Asian History: Postimperial Japan and Asia – Syllabus 2020 (pdf)
- History 855 – Historiography of Modern Japan – Syllabus 2020 (pdf)
- History 855 – Theory/History/Japan – Syllabus 2022 (pdf)
- History 855 – Modern Japan as Chronotope – Syllabus 2017 (pdf)
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Personal profile
About
Growing up in Korea with three sisters, Prof. Lee realized that memories and interpretations of the seemingly shared past could vary dramatically even within a family. As a natural extension of her interest in such dynamic process of producing historical memories and knowledge, Dr. Lee's research focuses on the competing narratives of collective violence in the context of modern East Asia, especially concerning the Japanese empire and colonial Korea. Committed to generating cross-disciplinary methodological innovation in the studies of empire, violence, imperialism/colonialism, and postcoloniality of East Asia, Prof. Lee incorporates a variety of historical texts such as paintings, children's writings, rumors, testimonials, and commemorations in her research and teaching in and beyond the conventional historical archives' boundaries. She has written and translated books, booklets, articles, scholarly reviews, and exhibition brochures in Japanese, Korean, and English. She has been an invited speaker, research fellow, and lecturer at institutions such as Harvard University, Brown University, Dartmouth College, University of Pennsylvania, Towson University, University of Chicago, Northwestern University, University of Illinois, Calvin College, University of Wisconsin, University of Minnesota, Michigan State University, Western Michigan State University, Ohio State University, University of Southern California, University of California - Los Angeles, University of California - Berkeley, University of Missouri - St. Louis, and University of Minnesota in the U.S., University of Tokyo, National Museum of Japanese History, Waseda University, Senshu University in Japan, University of Seoul, Ajou University, Sangmyong University in Korea, and Oxford University in UK. Dr. Lee got her interdisciplinary training in history, anthropology, area studies, literature, and linguistics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Drexel University in the U.S., University of Tokyo in Japan, and Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Korea.
Prof. Lee teaches undergraduate history courses including Modern Japan, North and South Korea, Modern China, Modern East Asia, Women in East Asia, Japanese Empire, Modern World History, and graduate seminars such as Narratives of Collective Violence in East Asia, Archive and Memories of the Japanese Empire, and Historiography (as guest lecturer). Her teaching has been recognized with Most Influential Faculty for the Presidential Scholars (Honors College, 2010), Outstanding Graduate Faculty Mentor Award (Graduate College, 2007), Excellent Undergraduate Teaching Award (University of Illinois, 2002), and Graduate Teacher Certificate (University of Illinois, 2000) among others. Dr. Lee has served as founding and elected Coordinator of Asian Studies since 2006.
Prof. Lee has received numerous grants from: National Museum of Japanese History and National Institute for the Humanities in Japan, Academy of Korean Studies in Korea, Association for Asian Studies, Illinois Humanities Council, Japan Foundation, Japanese Ministry of Education, College Women’s Association of Japan, University of Illinois, Brown University, and also from the following units at Eastern Illinois University: University Foundation, Faculty Development Office, Interdisciplinary Center for Global Diversity, and College of Arts and Humanities.
Prof. Lee teaches undergraduate history courses including Modern Japan, North and South Korea, Modern China, Modern East Asia, Women in East Asia, Japanese Empire, Modern World History, and graduate seminars such as Narratives of Collective Violence in East Asia, Archive and Memories of the Japanese Empire, and Historiography (as guest lecturer). Her teaching has been recognized with Most Influential Faculty for the Presidential Scholars (Honors College, 2010), Outstanding Graduate Faculty Mentor Award (Graduate College, 2007), Excellent Undergraduate Teaching Award (University of Illinois, 2002), and Graduate Teacher Certificate (University of Illinois, 2000) among others. Dr. Lee has served as founding and elected Coordinator of Asian Studies since 2006.
Prof. Lee has received numerous grants from: National Museum of Japanese History and National Institute for the Humanities in Japan, Academy of Korean Studies in Korea, Association for Asian Studies, Illinois Humanities Council, Japan Foundation, Japanese Ministry of Education, College Women’s Association of Japan, University of Illinois, Brown University, and also from the following units at Eastern Illinois University: University Foundation, Faculty Development Office, Interdisciplinary Center for Global Diversity, and College of Arts and Humanities.
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Research Interests
- History
- East Asian History
- Japanese Empire
- Colonial Korea
- Imperial legacies & postcoloniality in East Asia
- Colonial archive & knowledge production
- Children in history
- Social impact of disaster
- Gendered modernity
Disciplines
- History
Prizes
Courses
Press/Media
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