Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Morals and Minorities: Scholarly Publishing and the Lessons of Ramseyer
November 3, 2025
Editorial Note: This is a summary introduction to a longer essay Prof. Morris-Suzuki wrote in rebuttal to Harvard’s Mark Ramseyer. She has embedded hyperlinks to her original essay.
The international order, globally and in East Asia, is in the midst of a profound and unpredictable transformation. Worldwide, economic instability is increasing and the gulf between rich and poor is deepening. In this context, and in the context of the rapid evolution of online media, waves of nationalism and xenophobia are amplifying around the world. Japan is no exception to this trend, as evident from the rhetoric surrounding the advent of the new Japanese Prime Minister, Takaichi Sanae, who is known for her sometimes inflammatory statements about foreigners in Japan. This wave of jingoism has a long back-story. For thirty years, far right nationalist groups – some with links to fringe religions and/or influential business circles – have been pushing agendas which include historical denialism of some key events of the Asia Pacific War and hostile rhetoric towards foreign or minority groups in Japan.
A more recent participant in these inflamed wars of words is Harvard professor of law and economics J. Mark Ramseyer, whose work until 2019 had focused on the Japanese legal system and corporate law. In the past five or more years, he has become closely engaged with members of Japanese far-right study groups, and has focused much of his energy on championing their views: particularly on disseminating negative stereotypes of minority and vulnerable communities. These communities include the former ‘Comfort Women’, Koreans in Japan [Zainichi Koreans], members of the Hisabetsu Buraku community, Okinawans and most recently Ainu and indigenous minorities more generally. (The links provided here provide brief outlines of the background of each group).
Ramseyer’s approach to these issues typically involves writing papers which begin with a ‘theoretical’ discussion, drawing on an eclectic mix of economic and other theories. This provides an entry into ‘case studies’ of particular minorities or other marginalised social groups: case studies that repeatedly cherry-pick or misquote source material to produce sweeping and demeaning depictions of the target group. The many hundreds of thousands of Koreans in Japan, for example, are dismissed en masse as a ‘dysfunctional’ community with low social capital, high welfare dependence, low education levels and high crime rates: a group hijacked by ‘opportunistic fringe-left entrepreneurs’, who create ‘enormous ethnic tension within Japan’. ‘Comfort women’, we are told, were simply paid prostitutes. Members of the Buraku social minority are re-defined (in contradiction to the existing scholarly literature) as the descendants of ‘a loose collection of unusually self-destructive poor farmers’ with ‘dysfunctional norms’, who have brought social exclusion on themselves by ‘their involvement in crime and their disintegrating family structures’. Okinawan society, too, is ’dysfunctional’ (Ramseyer’s favourite epithet), with families ‘close to collapse’ and people collecting money from the government through ‘nuisance claims’. Most recently, Ainu are described (along with other indigenous societies) as having been people who ‘relentlessly fight each other over resources and women’. After failing to adjust to modernity, Ramseyer tells us, the Ainu have simply ‘disappeared’ from Japan.
I invite readers to imagine the reaction of academic journals if the targets of these articles, described with the same terminology, had been African Americans, Indigenous Americans or other US minority groups. Ramseyer, however, succeeded in having his articles on the ‘comfort women’, Hisabetsu Buraku and Koreans in Japan published in specialised journals in the field of law and economics, where they appear to have been peer reviewed by people without expertise in the relevant field of Japanese social history. Ramseyer’s Ainu paper has been uploaded on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), but has not yet been published any peer reviewed journal – it is unclear whether it has been submitted to one. It may be best to wait until a peer reviewed version appears before downloading, reading and seeking to critique it.
It is worth noting that Ramseyer offers no evidence of having attempted to engage with any members of the groups whom he targets. Why a professor from a prestigious academic institution should choose to spend the final years of his career launching such verbal attacks on groups with whom he seems to have no meaningful connection may always remain a mystery. But the Ramseyer case also raises much wider issues of integrity in scholarly publishing: issues which become increasingly important in an age of declining funding for higher education, the massive online circulation of ‘fake news’, and impassioned and often confused debates over hate speech in a world of free speech.
Articles like Ramseyer’s create a profound dilemma for scholars who have devoted years of their life to studying the histories of the groups whom the Harvard professor targets. Will an effort to expose the many flaws in his writings simply draw more attention to the negative stereotypes that he recycles, thus giving them greater traction? Will ignoring his papers allow misleading information to amplify unchecked? How can we counter the vicious cycle of inter-communal hostility that negative stereotyping provokes? How can we bring academic debate back to the realm of evidence-based research and respect for conflicting opinions, when faced with work riddled with factual errors and couched in pejorative language?
When Ramseyer’s ‘comfort women’ article appeared, many scholars in Japan, the US and elsewhere devoted great time and effort to highlighting its mass of historical inaccuracies. Some also sought a retraction from International Review of Law and Economics, which published the article. The journal conducted a two-year review, published two rebuttal articles, and chose to retain a statement of concern about possible inaccuracies the article’s content; but the editors did not withdraw the article, stating that they were unable to find evidence of ‘clear data fabrication or falsification’ by the author. A number of leading scholars on the history of the Hisabetsu Buraku community contacted the Review of Law and Economics, which had published one of Ramseyer’s articles on this subject, asking the journal to retract the article, but without success. It is worth noting, though, that other publishers have taken a different approach. Cambridge University Press, for example, decided to publish a chapter by Ramseyer on the privatization of the Japanese police in its Cambridge Handbook of Privatization only after all the (highly problematic) material on minority groups originally contained in the text had been removed.
The response of the European Journal of Law and Economics to criticisms of Ramseyer’s article on Koreans in Japan is discussed in detail in my paper ‘Koreans in Japan and Ethics in Scholarly Publishing: A response to Professor J. Mark Ramseyer’, now available on SSRN. As I explain in this paper, I originally wrote this in 2021 as a rebuttal article which I submitted to the journal, but I later withdrew it from publication for reasons explained in this (somewhat updated) SSRN version. Ramseyer’s article on Zainichi Koreans remains in print in the journal with only a very small portion of its mistakes corrected by a subsequent erratum.
My reason for making an updated version of my rebuttal article publicly available now is that, unchecked (or encouraged?) by previous experience, Ramseyer continues to publish papers on minority issues replicating all the flaws pointed out by careful scholarly critiques of his earlier articles. Like others, I am deeply concerned that his work, as well as being full of factual inaccuracies, may be aggravating the prejudice and hostility experienced by minorities and marginalised groups in Japan.
Writing critiques of Ramseyer’s ‘comfort women’, Zainichi Korean and Hisabetsu Buraku articles is a time-consuming process which takes scholars away from other important (and much more enjoyable) work. It involves spending many hours tracking down often obscure documents which have been cherry-picked or misquoted. It is, as I have also discovered, an emotionally draining and exhausting process. For those who care about this history and engage with the social groups involved, it is profoundly distressing to repeatedly read demeaning and ill-informed verbal abuse which many of us had hoped were disappearing from public discourse. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is supposed to be an international body dedicated to debating and advancing publication ethics, but appeals to COPE to provide guidance on Ramseyer’s ‘comfort women’ and Zainichi Korean articles resulted in their essentially leaving the judgment to the discretion of individual journal editors. A request to COPE to look at the Ramseyer case as a whole produced no response.
As I argue in my SSRN paper, it is now crucially important for those concerned with academic ethics and those engaged in scholarly publishing to take a much more serious look at the problems illustrated by the Ramseyer case – problems which are likely to become all the more severe as nationalist tensions and conflicts rise, and as fake news proliferates further in East Asia and worldwide. The large publishing corporations who own and profit from most peer reviewed journals have a moral responsibility to address this issue; so too does COPE. In a world of free speech, there must be room for widely varying views on contentious histories, including the histories of marginalised communities. But there should be no room for repeated misquotation and skewing of source material, nor for the propagation of offensive ethnic stereotypes and the litany of other problems that I outline in my paper ‘Koreans in Japan and Ethics in Scholarly Publishing’.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor Emerita, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University
3 Replies to “Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Morals and Minorities: Scholarly Publishing and the Lessons of Ramseyer”
TANI BARLOWNOVEMBER 3, 2025 AT 3:29 PM
All thanks to Professor Morris-Suzuki for circulating this important rebuke.
Reply
TANI BARLOWNOVEMBER 6, 2025 AT 7:58 PM
This is just excellent and I hope readers will follow the controversy and teach against this misuse of title, position and historical truth. A special issue of positions: East Asia Cultures Critique focusing on history writing and revisionism, titled “The War over History: Japan’s Textbook Controversy and East Asian Relations,” was published as Volume 11, Issue 3, Winter 2003. The guest editor for this issue was Claudia Derichs. The table of contents includes articles on the Japanese textbook controversy, nationalism and memory in East Asia, and reactions to Japanese historical revisionism. I use Miki Desai “Shusenjo” when I am teaching these matters. It hits students hard. https://www.shusenjo.com/
Reply
Mark HudsonDECEMBER 21, 2025 AT 5:53 PM
An excellent overview of the many problems associated with the recent work of this controversial Harvard professor. His Ainu paper has now been taken down from SSRN. It was so full of historical and anthropological mistakes that it is hard to imagine that it could ever pass peer review.
Reply
===
TITLE
Koreans in Japan and Ethics in Scholarly
Publishing: A Response to Professor J. Mark Ramseyer
AUTHOR: Tessa
Morris-Suzuki, Professor Emerita of Japanese History, College of
Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University,
Canberra, Australia, tessa.morris-suzuki@anu.edu.au
ABSTRACT:
Over the past five years, Harvard
Professor J. Mark Ramseyer has published a series of articles focussing on
controversial issues in Japanese society and history, particularly those
involving vulnerable communities or sections of society facing discrimination:
among them, the so-called ‘Comfort Women’, Koreans in Japan, the social
minority commonly known as Burakumin, and most recently, the Ainu indigenous
minority. These articles raise profound and ongoing issues of research
integrity and scholarly publication ethics. For that reason, I am making public
(with some additions and updates) a previously unpublished paper originally
written in 2021 as a rebuttal to an article by Professor Ramseyer on the Korean
minority in Japan. I believe that the issues raised here reflect a pattern of
research conduct repeated by Professor Ramseyer in many of his recent writings,
and that these raise very serious questions about scholarly conduct and peer
review, to which I return in the conclusions to this paper.
KEY WORDS: Academic
integrity; Koreans in Japan; academic ethics; peer review.
FUNDING: Not applicable.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST/COMPETING INTERESTS: Not applicable.
AVAILABILITY OF DATA AND MATERIAL: Source material is cited in the footnotes and reference
list.
CODE AVAILABILITY: Not applicable.
AUTHORS’
CONTRIBUTIONS: Sole authored.
Koreans in Japan and Ethics in Scholarly
Publishing: A Response to Professor J. Mark Ramseyer
Tessa
Morris-Suzuki
On 18
February 2021, an article by Harvard Professor J. Mark Ramseyer entitled
‘Social Capital
and the Problems of Opportunistic Leadership: The Example of
Koreans in Japan’ appeared online in the European Journal of Law and Economics.
The
print version of this article was published in September 2021 (Ramseyer
2021a). The first part of the article was
a theoretical discussion of social capital and the application of rational
choice theory to issues of ethnic discrimination. The second half was an
account of the social history of the Korean minority in Japan from the early
twentieth century to the present day.
I read this article on 20 February 2021
and, as a historian of modern Japan who has been researching the history of the
Korean community in Japan for over two decades, was startled by the author’s
apparent lack of familiarity with the relevant scholarly literature and
historical background, and by his disturbing use of source material. I
immediately contacted the journal editors to share my concerns, and received a
polite reply saying that they would address the issue seriously. I later also
corresponded with editorial staff at the journal’s publisher, Springer, who
told me that the issue was being investigated according the guidelines and
standards of the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE).
I waited for this process to run its
course, but by the end of May, I had heard nothing further, and was becoming
concerned that the article remained available online and that the
misinformation it contained was continuing to circulate in the Japanese and
Anglophone blogosphere and elsewhere. I therefore contacted the journal editors
again, and was informed of the outcome of the journal’s review process: ‘most
of the scholars who replied believe that the paper is a contribution to law and
economics, and it should be published, though leaving space (as usual in the academic
debate) for critical rebuttals.’ The journal was therefore planning to proceed
with print publication, and I was invited to submit a response to the
article.
The article below (originally entitled ‘Koreans in Japan: A Response to
Professor J. Mark Ramseyer’s “Social Capital and the Problems of Opportunistic
Leadership”’) is my response. I
submitted this rebuttal article to the European Journal of Law and
Economics, whose editors were willing to
publish it on condition that I made certain revisions, particularly to remove
statements which they felt contained ‘value judgments’, and to remove all
general discussion of matters of peer review and publication ethics. They also,
oddly, asked me to remove the reference to a 1990 comparative survey of
Zainichi Korean education and occupational prestige (on p. 4 below) because
they understood Ramseyer’s paper to be about with the situation before and
shortly after the second World War, and not about Koreans in Japan today. They
added ‘it is also clear that all reasons, which Ramseyer proposes as causes of
statistical discrimination of Koreans in Japan disappeared with Korea becoming
a highly developed and rich country. So, this part does not seem pertinent’
This despite the fact that Ramseyer’s article itself makes no claim about the
‘causes of statistical discrimination’ having disappeared, and on the contrary
contains a whole section entitled ‘Residual Disfunction’ which quotes figures
purporting to show high Korean crime and welfare dependency rates in 2010 and
2015 (Ramseyer 2021a, 24– 25)
Had my rebuttal been published, Professor Ramseyer would have had the
right of reply, which would have been the final word in the debate. I was
unable to obtain from the journal the assurances which I sought that Professor
Ramseyer’s reply would be peer reviewed by scholars with expertise in the
history of the Korean community in Japan. I was also disturbed by the way in
which the journal handled the peer reviews of my article, not least because it
appeared to me that they had ignored very important critical points made by one
of the two reviewers about the sections of Ramseyer’s work which I had cited. I
therefore chose to withdraw this article from consideration by the journal.
However, I believe that it is important to make the concerns which I outlined
available to readers, particularly given the ongoing dissemination of flawed
research by Professor Ramseyer, so am publishing them here with some updates.
[Italicised sentences indicate sections which I have added to provide
additional information. Other than these, the text published here is the text
which I submitted to the European Journal of Law and Economics as my rebuttal article].
1. Peer Review and Academic Integrity
The problems embodied in this [Ramseyer’s] article are multiple and
complex, but underlying all of them are wider issues of academic integrity and
peer review. Peer review – the process by which academic publications are
examined by independent experts in the field to check their quality and
accuracy – is universally recognised as ‘an essential element of the
communication and documentation processes that ensure the quality and
trustworthiness of modern research and scholarship’.[1] It is
particularly vital in a world of proliferating misinformation and fake news. In
societies that value
free speech, people with a wide range of views – from the
mildly controversial to the truly bizarre – are free to express those views (as
long as they are not libellous or an incitement to violence) in many venues,
including on websites and blogs, at the gatherings of clubs and lobby groups,
on the street corner or in non-refereed publications. Peer review, though, is
vital to assure readers of academic articles that the content they are reading
is not just someone’s random opinion, but does actually meet serious scholarly
standards; and the peer review system is now under growing pressure from a
range of sources.
Scholarly publishing is dominated by a
small number of large publishing houses, who mobilise the (generally unpaid)
labour of academics as editors, members of editorial boards and peer reviewers.
Academics are under increasing pressure to teach longer hours, sit on more
committees and submit more articles to peer-reviewed journals (which in turn
adds to the work-load of already overburdened editors and peer reviewers).
Academia, meanwhile, is more than ever separated into disciplinary silos with
little contact with one another. The deleterious consequences of all these trends
seem apparent in the problems of Professor Ramseyer’s article.
The first one-third of Professor
Ramseyer’s 32-page article is taken up with theoretical discussions about
issues of social capital and statistical discrimination. The remaining
two-thirds consists of an account of the history and present situation of the
Korean minority in Japan. Of course, I have no direct information about the
peer review process that was applied to this article, but it seems probable
that it was reviewed by people with expertise in the relevant areas of theory.
However, I find it impossible to conceive that the article could have been peer
reviewed by any expert on the history of Koreans in Japan without the
reviewer(s) noticing any of the scholarly problems which I will list below. I
am mystified as to why the article was published when two-thirds of its content
had not been peer reviewed, but perhaps the pressures on the review system
mentioned earlier were part of the cause.
It is encouraging to see that a number
of key academic bodies, including the European Federation of Academies of
Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA), are now promoting wider discussion on the
evolution of peer review and on ways to maintain and improve the quality of
peer review in a changing academic environment, and I hope that the debate
around problems posed by the Ramseyer article will contribute to these
discussions.
2. The Korean Community in Contemporary Japan
My comments below address the section
of the article that deals with the history of Koreans in Japan. I will not
attempt to discuss the theory section of the article, which is outside my field
of expertise, although – as a historian – I note with interest Professor
Ramseyer’s belief in the potential of rational-choice economics to elucidate
the causes of the Holocaust (Ramseyer 2021, p. 4). In my comments, I refer to Koreans
in Japan using the common term ‘Zainichi Koreans’, but this term needs some
explanation. Indeed, one of the fundamental flaws in Professor Ramseyer’s
article is his failure to tell his readers what he means by ‘Koreans in Japan’.
Is he referring to people with Korean nationality, Korean ancestry, Korean
ethnic identity, or some combination of all three?
Professor Ramseyer’s article nowhere
mentions the important fact that the Japanese government does not collect
statistics on ethnicity or ethnic identity. Therefore, official statistics on
‘Koreans in Japan’ almost always refer to people with Korean nationality. From
1952 to the late 1960s at least, almost all Koreans in Japan had Korean
nationality because, although they had been Japanese nationals in the colonial
period, their Japanese nationality had been unilaterally abrogated by the
Japanese government on 28 April 1952, the day when Japan regained its full
independence following the allied occupation (Takemae 2002, p. 511) The number
of Koreans in Japan who retain Korean nationality has declined in recent years
because a growing proportion of those with Korean ancestry (particularly third,
fourth or fifth generation Koreans in Japan) have acquired Japanese nationality
either through naturalisation or because one of their parents is Japanese. But
the relationship between nationality and identity is complex. Those who have
become Japanese nationals have not necessarily ‘merged into Japanese society
and disappeared from the ranks of Japan-resident Koreans’, any more than
American citizens with Korean heritage have necessarily vanished from the ranks
of Korean-Americans. Many Japanese nationals with Korean ancestry celebrate
their Korean heritage and retain strong links to the wider Zainichi Korean
community (See, for example, Fukuoka 2000, pp. 192‒169; Lie 2008, pp.
161‒162)
Professor Ramseyer tells us that ‘Japan-resident
Koreans with the social, intellectual, and linguistic resources necessary to
thrive in Japanese society would increasingly choose to merge into that
society. Disproportionately, those who remained were those without those
resources. And just as those who remained Korean lacked the resources necessary
to thrive in competitive modern Japan, they also lacked the resources necessary
to stop opportunistic political entrepreneurs from within their own ranks’
(Ramseyer 2021, p. 23). As a result, we are informed, Koreans in Japan are a
‘dysfunctional group’ (Ramseyer 2021, p. 28) with low social capital, high
welfare dependence, low education levels and high crime rates: a group hijacked
by ‘opportunistic fringe-left entrepreneurs’, who create ‘enormous ethnic
tension within Japan’, and generating ‘hostility and discrimination against
their fellow Koreans’ (Ramseyer 2021, pp. 23‒26 and 27‒28).
There are large numbers of careful
academic studies of the contemporary Zainichi Korean community, published in
Japanese, English, Korean and other languages.
Professor Ramseyer seems unaware of almost all of them.
Were he familiar with
them, he would know that scholarly studies of the Korean
community in Japan have demonstrated how ‘naïve arguments’ reproducing such
stereotypes of Zainichi Koreans are without empirical foundation (Kim 2003, p.
6). A comparison of young Japanese and Zainichi Korean[2] men
conducted in the mid-1990s, for example, found that by that time there was ‘no
statistically significant difference in years of education and occupational
prestige scores’ between Zainichi Koreans and Japanese. (Kim 2003, pp. 8‒9; see
also Kim 2011).
Professor Ramseyer’s claim that the
community has been hijacked by ‘opportunistic fringe-left entrepreneurs’ is
also mystifying, particularly since he presents absolutely no evidence to
support his statement, nor does he identify these ‘entrepreneurs’ – although
his article implies that they are associated with the proNorth Korean
organization ‘Soren’ (on which see below).
A crucial part of the story which Ramseyer again fails to mention is
that members of the long-term Korean resident community in Japan are required
(for complex historical reasons) to register themselves with the Japanese
authorities either as ‘Zainichi
Kankokujin’ (using the name for ‘Korea’ adopted by the South Korean
government) or as ‘Zainichi Chōsenjin’
(using the name for Korea which is incorporated into the official title of North
Korea).
Although these names are not precise
indicators of political affiliation (Zainichi
Kankokujin do not necessarily support the policies of the South Korean
government, and not all Zainichi
Chōsenjin are pro-North Korean), they are a rough indicator of positions on
the political spectrum. As of 2020, according to Japanese government
statistics, amongst members of the long term Zainichi Korean community who
retain their Korean nationality and are registered with the Japanese
authorities, 281,266 (91.1%) choose to register as Zainichi Kankokujin (i.e. using the South Korean affiliated
identifier) as opposed to 27,543 (8.9%) who are registered as Zainichi Chōsenjin (i.e. using the
identifier often seen as being associated with North Korea).[3] On
what, then, does Professor Ramseyer base his claim that the Korean community is
dominated by communist leaders?
3. Contextual Understanding and Historical Logic
Professor Ramseyer is a specialist in the field of law and
economics who has
(particularly in the past two years) chosen to move into
the field of history writing. Careful application of law and economic theory to
the study of history could be an illuminating and productive process; but when
Ramseyer writes history he still needs
to abide by the scholarly practices of history writing,
unless he can provide a very cogent reason for abandoning them (which he has
not done). One of these fundamental scholarly practices is familiarising
yourself with the existing literature in the field – with which you can then
proceed to agree or disagree. In the case of history writing, this is
important, not only so that you can compare your views of the past with those
of others, but also so that you can gain a general understanding of the
historical context and chronology of the events you are discussing. Professor
Ramseyer has manifestly failed to do this, which is why the problems evident in
his discussion of the contemporary situation of Koreans in Japan are replicated
throughout the historical sections of his article.
The article repeatedly makes sweeping
assertions which, on the face of it, may sound logical, but only appear so if
you have very little knowledge of the historical context being discussed. For
example, in the sections of his article entitled ‘What Koreans Brought’ and
‘What Koreans Did’, Professor Ramseyer states that colonial era Korean migrants
to Japan brought only negative characteristics with them: lack of education,
illiteracy, high crime rates, lack of ‘steady effort’ and work efficiency, and habits
that Japanese landlords considered ‘unsanitary’ (Ramseyer 2021, pp. 14‒156. These
‘lacks’ are used to justify the fact that Japanese employers and landlords shunned
Koreans in favour of Japanese workers and tenants. Employers, Ramseyer argues,
would of course have preferred Japanese workers who came from a more skilled,
educated and industrially disciplined background.
But male Korean migrants seeking
low-skilled work in Japanese cities in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s were not
competing against highly-skilled and experienced Japanese urban industrial
workers. They were, by and large, competing against a mass of young Japanese
men and women from poor farm families like their own, with a similar lack of
experience in the disciplines of industrial labour, who were flowing into
Japanese cities at the same time; and the Koreans were systematically being
paid lower wages. As Kazuhiro Abe has pointed out, Japanese employers seeking
cheap labour often enthusiastically sought out Korean workers, so ‘in 1921,
when the Japanese colonial government in Korea relaxed the restrictions on
emigration of Koreans to Japan, which “was in the midst of an acute economic
crisis with the rate of unemployment increasing daily,” the colonial policy was
welcomed by “Japanese industry”’(Abe 1983, p. 44).[4] Ramseyer’s
‘efficiency’ rationale for the fact that ‘Japanese employers avoided Koreans
when they could’ (Ramseyer 2021, p. 14) is unfounded.
Professor Ramseyer also treats the Korean labour market in
prewar and wartime
Japan as though it were operating according to the pure
principles market rationalism.
He gives figures showing that the population of Koreans in
Japan rose from about
130,000 in 1925 to 1.2 million in 1940 and over 2.2 million
by 1945, and writes that
‘Koreans moved to Japan for the money’ (Ramseyer 2021, p.
13). In a footnote and with no details, he briefly refers to a ‘restrictive
recruiting effort’ by Japan to encourage Koreans to work in Japan – adding
(with absolutely no supporting evidence) that a ‘substantial minority of
Koreans who applied for the jobs were not hired’ – and also mentions a
subsequent draft of Korean workers that started in the fall of 1944 (Ramseyer
2021, p. 13, footnote 2). What he is coyly alluding to here is the fact that
around one-third of the Koreans in Japan at the end of the Asia-Pacific War –
at least 700,000 people – were there because they had been conscripted as
wartime labourers by the Japanese state, by means which included threats,
deception or violence (Nishinarita 2000, p. 398; Naitou 2005).
Using official government sources,
under the heading ‘What Koreans Did’, Ramseyer states that arrest rates of
Koreans for all crimes and for serious crimes were many times higher than those
for Japanese. (Ramseyer 2021, p. 16) He goes on to list a litany of delinquent
behaviour by Koreans. What he fails to make clear is that the statistics he
presents have been subject to postwar scholarly analysis which highlights a
point that might be deduced from Ramseyer’s own descriptions of the social makeup
of the Korean population: the majority (though not all) of prewar Korean
migrants to Japan were young, male and relatively poor. The prewar comparisons
between Japanese and Korean crime rates, cited by Ramseyer, fail to factor in
age, class and gender. If the crime rates of young, male Japanese of lower
socio-economic status in the prewar period are compared with those recorded for
the same cohort of Koreans in Japan in the same prewar periods, there is no
difference between them (Ueda 2005, 2331‒2332).
In the section of his article headed
‘Terrorism’ (Ramseyer 2021, pp. 16‒17), Ramseyer does not refer to any postwar
scholarship in any language about the 1919 independence demonstrations in Korea
and their aftermath – an aftermath which included mass arrests and killings by
the Japanese colonial authorities – nor does he refer to any contemporary
eyewitness accounts by foreigners in the Japanese empire about the Japanese
suppression of the independence movement by Koreans. (There is substantial
English and other foreign language eyewitness testimony on this, particularly
from European missionaries in Korea at the time – see, for example, Lee 2019).
Instead, Ramseyer conflates the complex Korean independence post-1919 movements
with ‘terrorism’, failing even to mention that large sections of the movement
were driven by liberal, Christian or other ideologies (for example, Wells 1990;
Park 2014; Lew 2014).
The problems of contextual knowledge
become even more serious when we move on to the postwar period. To paraphrase,
Professor Ramseyer’s arguments are as follows. There were about 1.9 million
Koreans living in Japan at the end of the war.[5] Though
many returned to Korea after the end of the war, Korea was divided and
South Korea came under the right-wing rule of Syngman Rhee
(Yi Seungman). As a result, left-wing Koreans were more likely to remain in
Japan, which tolerated ‘leftist dissent’, while ‘apolitical’ Koreans were more
likely to return to South Korea (Ramseyer 2021, p. 20). Then, as a result of an
abortive left-wing uprising on the Korean island of Jeju, a very large number
of left-wing Koreans fled to Japan as refugees. These ‘communist refugees from
Syngman Rhee’s South Korea’ took over the leadership of the Korean community in
Japan, and ‘did so violently, in a way that generated massive Japanese
hostility’ (Ramseyer 2021, pp. 20‒21). This created the basis for the problems
with the Korean community Professor Ramseyer goes on to discuss in the
remainder of his article.
It all sounds perfectly logical – if
you are unaware of or prepared to ignore the chronology of postwar Japanese and
Korean history. I will deal with the remarkable historical inaccuracy in
Professor Ramseyer’s description of the Jeju uprising in the following section,
but here, let us just look at other aspects of his account. Approximately
950,000 Koreans in Japan returned to Korea by unofficial means between the
final months of the Pacific War and November 1945 (Watt 2009, pp. 91‒ 92). Soon
after Japan’s defeat in August 1945, the Allied occupation forces also started
an official repatriation program, and by the end of 1945, a total of over 1.3
million Koreans had returned to Korea by either unofficial or official means
(Takemae 2002, p. 448) In March 1946, Japan’s Welfare Ministry calculated that
around 647,000 Koreans remained in Japan (Takemae 2002, p. 448) As Professor
Ramseyer’s own figures suggest, this number remained roughly constant until the
end of the twentieth century – not because there was no further migration, but
because subsequent cross-border flows were much smaller in scale and took place
in both directions.
But during the period
when this postwar mass repatriation was taking place, South
Korea was not under
the control of Syngman Rhee. The Korean Peninsula was under US/Soviet
occupation, and politics in the southern half of Korea were in a state of
complete flux and confusion. Syngman Rhee was just one of a number of
politicians, including left wing-Korean nationalists, who were still nominally
cooperating until the middle of 1946, and, although he became more overtly
right-wing and more influential thereafter, Rhee did not acquire full
Presidential powers until the formation of the Republic of Korea in July 1948
(Lew 2014, pp. 270‒280) so his anticommunism did not determine the
decisions of those who chose to be repatriated or to remain in Japan during the
mass repatriation of 1945 to early 1946. The official repatriation program
organized by the allied authorities required returnees to leave most of their
assets in Japan. They were allowed to take with them only 1000 yen (equivalent,
during a period of rampant inflation, to the value of about twenty packs of
cigarettes) and a small amount of luggage (Conde 1947)[6]. As
researchers of the issue have pointed out, this meant that more
entrepreneurially successful members of the Korean community were discouraged
from returning to Korea, probably skewing the political selection of migration
in the opposite direction to the one suggested by Ramseyer (Caprio and Yu 2009,
p. 32).
Professor Ramseyer also seems largely
unaware of the existing research on Korean political organizations in postwar
Japan – he is certainly very hazy about organizations, events and chronologies.
He tells his readers that ‘almost immediately after the end of the war,
communists commandeered the formal Korean organizations’ (Ramseyer 2021, p.
21), not naming the organizations that he is referring to, and citing the name
of Kim Chon-hae as his sole example of a leader. After some organizational and
name changes, Ramseyer says, the group ‘eventually took the name Soren’ and
‘the violence began almost immediately’ (Ramseyer 2021, p. 21). He goes on to illustrate
this with some lurid examples of ‘Korean violence’ between 1945 and 1950. The group in which Kim Chon-hae played a
leading role was the League of Koreans in Japan (known in Japanese as Zainihon Chōsenjin Renmei, or Chōren for short) (Oh 2009). This
organization was established in 1945 and dissolved by a decree of the Allied
occupation forces in 1949. It was increasingly led by left-wing activists, and
did organize mass protests which sometimes ended in violent clashes with
police, but these were in large measure provoked by a 1948 government decree
ordering the closure of Korean schools in Japan (a crucial event in the history
of Koreans in Japan, nowhere mentioned by Professor Ramseyer). Chōren was not dominated by ‘Communist
refugees from Syngman’s Rhee’s South Korea’, because the influx of these
refugees only began shortly before the organization was dissolved. Nor did it morph into ‘Soren’ – actually Chongryun (in Korean) or Sōren (in Japanese), the latter being
short for Zainichi Chōsenjin Sōrengōkai,
which was a separate pro-North Korean organization established in 1955 and
still existing today.
Sōren’s
founding mission was to separate the Korean community in Japan from the influence
of the Japanese Communist Party, and to redirect Koreans’ loyalty to North Korea.
It encouraged its members not to engage in revolutionary activity in Japan, but
to focus on contributing to the rebuilding and strengthening of North Korea
(Lie 2008, pp. 40‒41). Sōren is open
to very serious criticism on a wide range of grounds, but – despite the
confused account given by Professor Ramseyer in his article – initiating acts
of violence between 1945 and 1950 and subservience to the Japanese Communist
Party are not among them.
The discussion of the South Korean
affiliated organization Mindan (short
for ZaiNihon Daikanminkoku Kyoryū Mindan)
is equally muddled. Ramseyer depicts this organization as ‘a way station along
the path to full assimilation’ which ‘catered to the
Japan-resident Koreans who had largely forgotten their
Korean (if they ever knew it) and could weather Japan on their own’ (Ramseyer
2021, p. 22). His only source for these statements is The Postwar History of Japan-Resident Koreans by Ko Ui (whose name
is misspelled in his reference list). The subtitle of this book (not cited by
Ramseyer) translates as The Unfulfilled
Dream of Mun Dongong Who Ran Through the Kobe Black Market, and the work is
actually a fascinating biographical study of an individual Zainichi Korean man
whose life-story vividly illustrates the inadequacy of Professor Ramseyer’s
reductionist image of Zainichi Korean politics. The pages of the book which are
cited by Ramseyer do not support the statements about Mindan made in his article: they refer to an organization which
existed before the founding of Mindan,
and explain how some young Koreans who participated in this organization, and
who spoke little Korean, developed their own distinctive form of non-communist
Korean nationalism (Ko 2014).
Professor Ramseyer’s subsequent
discussion of the misdeeds of Sōren
also somehow manages to skate around the obvious point which further undercuts
his core contention about the ‘political selection’ of Korean migration to and
from Japan. In the late 1940s, there was an inflow of ‘boat people’ from South
Korea (particularly from Jeju Island), some of whom (though not all) were left
wing and were fleeing persecution by the Syngman Rhee regime. But this flow (as
we shall see) is greatly exaggerated by Professor Ramseyer, and it was followed
by a larger outflow of over 90,000 Koreans, this time from Japan to North
Korea, which began in late 1959 and continued until 1984, but largely took
place in the early 1960s. Here the ‘reverse political selection’ – that is, the
tendency for more left-wing Koreans to leave Japan and more conservative
Koreans to stay – was even more marked than it was in 1945‒ 1946
repatriation.
In the section of his essay entitled
‘Repatriation’, Professor Ramseyer tells us that ‘during the 1960s and 1970s,
Soren leaders displayed their opportunism most brutally in the way they
encouraged their rank-and-file to emigrate to North Korea’ (Ramseyer 2021, p.
26) But he remains silent about the obvious inference: though not all of the
Koreans who took part in this repatriation had strong political views, those
who did were (not surprisingly) almost exclusively left-wing and pro-North
Korean. This repatriation – which was enthusiastically backed and partially
orchestrated not only by Sōren and
the North Korean government but also by the Japanese government and the
Japanese Red Cross (Morris-Suzuki 2007) – led to the departure from Japan of
many left-wing Korean activists, including a substantial proportion of the
left-wing refugees from Jeju Island who had arrived in Japan in the late 1940s.
One additional part of
the story further undermines Professor Ramseyer’s ‘political selection’ thesis.
Though his Table 4 distinguishes ‘Resident Koreans’ from ‘Other Koreans’,
Professor Ramseyer nowhere explains this distinction. In addition to the
Zainichi Korean population who are descendants of
colonial era or immediate postwar immigrants, ‘Koreans in Japan’ also include
over 100,000 more recent migrants – commonly known as ‘newcomers’ – who have
migrated to Japan from South Korea since the 1980s. These people include
college students, professionals, blue- and whitecollar workers, and spouses of
Japanese nationals, and they are not ‘politically selected’ as ‘left wing’.[7]
4. The Use of Historical Sources
A second principle fundamental to the
study of history is an understanding of how to use source material. This is
something taught to all students of history, and although there are many
debates about the best approach to the process, the underlying principles are
clear. Historical sources, as the product of human beings, reflect personal
experiences and biases. Historians therefore need to choose their sources with
care, be conscious of biases and silences in their materials, and draw on
multiple sources so as to create (as far as possible) rounded accounts of the
past. It is also often important to provide readers with some information about
the nature of the sources you are using, to help them form their own judgments
about events of the past. A further critical flaw of the two-thirds of
Ramseyer’s article which deals with the history of Koreans in Japan is that it
does none of these things.
The only sources for
his accounts of ‘What Koreans Did’ and ‘Terrorism’ in prewar Japan are official
materials produced by the Japanese authorities of the day (including colonial
Japanese authorities in Korea), and ‘Miki 1933’, this last also being the major
source for his comments on Koreans’ ‘high crime rates’ and on the 1923
massacres of Koreans. Professor Ramseyer makes no mention of the possibility
that these government sources might not be entirely unbiased. ‘Miki 1933’, as
it is listed in the bibliography, might appear to readers to be an academic
article in the law field, but is in fact a report on ‘Korean Crimes’ by Miki
Imaji, a Japanese state prosecutor of ‘thought crimes’, whose main task was to
hunt down Koreans seen as subversive by the state – a task which he performed
with such enthusiasm that he was subsequently was purged from public office by
the Allied occupation authorities (see Kawashima 2009, p. 249 note 58).
In his account of the massacres of
Koreans which followed the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 (Ramseyer 2021, pp.
17‒20), Ramseyer draws a number of his sources from Volume 6 of the multivolume
Gendaishi Shiryō (Sources on
Contemporary History), a 646-page work
which focuses specifically on ‘Koreans and the Great Kantō Earthquake’ and
contains a mass of official documents, newspaper
reports, diary entries, photographs, eyewitness testimonies
from Japanese and Korean inhabitants of Tokyo etc. about the circumstances,
nature and extent of the massacres. He chooses to ignore all of its content
except for further official and newspaper reports which repeat more
unsubstantiated rumours about ‘Korean Crimes’.
Enigmatically, he lists most of these newspaper articles in
his reference list as having been ‘retrieved’ in 1923 or 1924.
He cites the much more recent 2008/2009 official ‘Report
of the Special
Investigative Committee Relating to
Lessons Inherited from the Great Disaster’ (volume 2) as a source for the
statement that ‘three hours after the earthquake, survivors began to hear
rumors of marauding Korean gangs’, and elaborates this with the words ‘The
Koreans torched buildings, people said. They planted bombs, they poisoned water
supplies, they murdered, they pillaged, they raped’ (Ramseyer 2021, p. 17) –
but he fails to explain to readers that, far from suggesting that any of these
rumours was true, the Special Investigative Committee’s report treats them as examples
of the ‘interpretation gone crazy’ (imizuke
no bōsō) typical of crisis situations where people have only ‘fragments of
information’ and lack the background knowledge necessary to interpret these
fragments correctly. The report also notes that, in the first few days after
the earthquake, the army and police were involved in spreading unfounded tales
of Korean misdeeds (Naikakufu Chūō Bōsai Kaigi 2008/2009a, and Naikakufu Chūō
Bōsai Kaigi 2008/2009b). This report, incidentally, is (equally enigmatically) listed
in Ramseyer’s reference list as having been ‘retrieved July 2005’ – over three
years before it was published.
Meanwhile, Ramseyer excoriates ‘western
scholars’ for generally discounting the ‘reports of Korean violence’ while
taking ‘the newspaper accounts of retaliatory Japanese violence nearly at face
value’ (Ramseyer 2021, p. 18, footnote 8). But serious scholars of this topic
do not rely primarily on the lurid 1923 newspaper reports. They use a range of
sources, of which some of the most important are investigations, court cases
and debates which occurred in Japan in the months and years immediately after
the massacre. In the mid-1920s, there was much soul searching in Japan itself
about the massacres by those who had witnessed them or their aftermath. One
educator, for example, wrote in a 1924 essay that ‘we killed them because they
were xxx people[8]; we
killed them because they looked like xxx people… people said we must kill
Koreans because they, exploiting the postdisaster situation, were doing wrong
and threatening our people’. The educator concluded that this had been a
‘disgraceful act’ which had tarnished Japan’s image. Waseda University professor
Hoashi Riichirō similarly wrote in 1923 that the massacres had been ‘extremely
disgusting and internationally shameful’ (quoted in Schenking 2013, pp. 28‒
29).
As a prime culprit in the exaggeration
of the massacre story, Professor Ramseyer points to Rice University Professor
Sonia Ryang, who, he tells us, suggests in one of her articles that the number
of Korean massacre victims may have been 20,000 (Ramseyer 2021, p. 18, footnote
8). In the relevant article (readily accessible online) Ryang actually makes no
such suggestion. What she writes is that ‘while the number can never be
specified precisely’ many sources agree that ‘approximately six thousand of the
20,000 Koreans residing in the Kanto area were killed’ (Ryang 2007). Professor
Ryang contacted Professor Ramseyer immediately after the online publication of
his article to request a correction of this mistake, and was assured by him that he would have the misquotation promptly
corrected by the editors. This did not happen, and when I mentioned Professor
Ryang’s complaint to the editors four month later, they told me that Professor
Ramseyer had not informed them of it. At the time when I wrote my rebuttal
September 2021, the misquotation had not yet been corrected, and no erratum
notice had been inserted.
Professor Ramseyer’s use of newspaper
articles is nothing short of astonishing. He fails to mention the fact that
they were produced under conditions of severe censorship (Weisenfeld 2012,
chapter 2) or that, in the days immediately after the earthquake, Tokyo’s media
had been thrown into total chaos – communications were non-existent, because of
the massive damage caused by the earthquake, and many papers were reduced to
relying on a handful of staff to produce one or two-page handouts containing
whatever information they could cobble together (Schencking 2013, p. 36).
A good example of Ramseyer’s approach
to his source material is his citation of a horrific article from the Kahoku Shimpō, which describes how
panicked citizens, fleeing fires which killed thousands of people, heard a
series of explosions, which were followed by rumours that these were the sound
of Koreans setting off bombs. A group of people from the mob then seized a Korean
in their midst, who promptly ‘confessed’ that he had exploded the bombs, which
(he said) he had made in order to carry out a terrorist attack on high ranking
officials. He was (according to the Kahoku
Shimpō) immediately beheaded on the spot with a sword, while 24 other
Koreans who had the misfortune to be in the area at the time were tied up with
wire, hacked with firefighters’ billhooks and thrown into a river to drown.
Those who failed to die quickly were hit on the head with the billhooks again
until they were dead, and a further three were thrown onto a pile of flaming
coke and left to burn to death (Kahoku Shimpō 1923a).
Professor Ramseyer combines selected
parts of this report that fit his narrative with information from a separate
article from the same newspaper, which mentions explosions, followed by rumours
that these had been caused by bombs stored by Koreans who planned to attack the
forthcoming wedding of the Crown Prince (Kahoku Shimpō 1923b). Despite the fact
that the author of the second article repeatedly uses the words ‘rumours’, ‘it
is said’ etc., and that it is unclear whether or not the two articles are referring
to the same incident, Ramseyer produces an account of these events which makes
no mention at all of the circumstances of the ‘confession’ or its aftermath,
but instead reads (in full):
The Kahoku shimpo
newspaper detailed a confession taken from a Korean caught carrying a bomb. He
and other activists, he said, had planned a massive terrorist attack on the
wedding of the crown prince (later the Showa emperor) scheduled for that fall.
In the face of the earthquake, they had accelerated their plans (Ramseyer 2021,
p. 17).
On the basis of this (to put it gently)
creative use of source materials, Professor Ramseyer seeks to persuade his
readers that at least some of the rumours of pillage, rape and murder by
Koreans were probably true – though he cannot tell us how many or which ones –
and that the accepted accounts of Japanese massacres of Koreans have been much
exaggerated – although he cannot provide a more accurate alternative than to
suggest that the number killed was somewhere between 400 and 5200. His
calculation of the maximum number of dead is based on guestimates of the Korean
population of the Tokyo area at the time and the fact that police ‘placed 7000
in protective custody and helped them return to Korea’, which ‘leaves 5200
Koreans as potential murder victims’ (Ramseyer 2021, p. 19).
It is true that he
does cite one postwar academic source in support of his arguments. That source
is Yamada Shōji’s 2012/2013 article ‘What Happened in the Area of Greater Tokyo
Right after the Great Kantō Earthquake’ (Yamada 2012/2013). Ramseyer describes
Yamada as having ‘done some of the most careful work on the topic’ (Ramseyer
2021, p. 19), which might lead readers unfamiliar with Yamada’s work to the
conclusion that it somehow accords with Ramseyer’s own approach. But the only
thing that Ramseyer actually cites from Yamada are a few estimates of the
numbers of Koreans living in the Kanto district. He makes no mention of the
fact that the key points of Yamada careful (and meticulously sourced) essay are
as follows:
-
various Japanese state agencies including the
police were alarmed by the growing presence of Koreans in and around the
capital, and deliberately helped to provoke the massacres by disseminating
fabricated rumours about Korean crimes or conspiracies (Yamada 2012/2013, pp.
8‒9);
-
police then turned a blind eye to, or assisted,
massacres by mobs or vigilante groups (Yamada 2012/2013, pp. 13‒14);
-
Japanese military units not only helped to
spread the rumours but also participated in the massacres – Yamada lists
fourteen such incidents, including one where soldiers used machine guns to
‘massacre Koreans in large numbers’ (Yamada 2012/2013, pp. 10‒11);
-
the massacres were accompanied by widespread
sexual abuse of Korean women
(Yamada 2012/2013, p. 15);
-
the military and others concealed the extent of
the killings by burying or burning bodies (Yamada 2012/2013, pp. 11 and
16);
-
the Japanese state covered up its own
involvement in the massacres by prosecuting some private vigilantes, while
allowing soldiers and police involved in the massacre to avoid punishment
(Yamada 2012/2013, 17‒;18) Based on
these findings, Yamada calls on the Japanese state to apologize for the
massacres (Yamada 2012/2013, p. 1).
Yamada’s essay also
highlights a fundamental flaw in Ramseyer’s massacre body count. Ramseyer relies
on the assumption that the 7000 Koreans placed in ‘protective custody’ could
not have become massacre victims. But Yamada documents cases of people who were
placed in ‘protective custody’ only to be handed over by their ‘protectors’ to
the mob to be killed (Yamada 2012/2013, p. 14). All of this leaves one wondering
about the enigmatic question mark at the end of Professor Ramseyer’s section
heading ‘Japanese Massacres?’ Is the question mark supposed to imply that a
mere four hundred dead (Ramseyer’s minimum figure – far lower than figures
suggested by studies such as the Special Investigative Committee’s 2008 report)
would not constitute a real massacre?
5. Historical Sources in an Age of Fake News
The problem with Professor Ramseyer’s
approach to the use of sources is not just that they produce extremely
questionable interpretations of history, but also that they generate factual
errors which undermine some of his own key arguments. A striking example is his
discussion of the the 1948 uprising and subsequent massacres on the Korean
island of Jeju (commonly known as the Jeju 4.3 Incident), which, he claims, resulted
in a flood of communist refugees entering Japan. He writes: ‘estimates of the number
it killed range from 15,000 to 60,000—this on an island with a population of
only 290,000. Almost immediately, however, surviving Jeju leftists began to
leave surreptitiously for Japan. Given that they migrated illegally, the number
is hard to know. But by 1957, barely 30,000 people still lived on the island’
(Ramseyer 2021, p.
21).
This statement, as any Jeju Islander
could tell you, is absurd, as is the implied conclusion that more than 200,000
islanders might have fled to Japan as refugees. It appears to be a misreading
of official estimates which suggest that, as a result of the uprising,
massacres and refugee outflow, Jeju’s population fell from around 283,000 in
1946 to around 250,400 in 1949 – in other words, by about 30,000, not to
about 30,000 (National Committee for Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju
April 3 Incident 2003, p. 452). There are no authoritative figures showing how
many of these people were massacred, how many died from other causes and how
many fled to Japan. However, if we accept that the roughly 30,000 decline in
Jeju’s population between 1946 and 1949 represents both victims of the
massacres and refugees fleeing to Japan, and that some further outflow of
refugees continued into the early 1950s, a realistic estimate for the number
heading for Japan would be in the thousands or low tens of thousands at the
most.
How could Professor Ramseyer have made
such a mistake? Click on the link in his reference list, and the reason quickly
becomes evident (Ramseyer 2021, p. 32). His source for these statistics is an
anonymous online blog, set up by an
Internet activist with the aim of
prophesying the impending simultaneous destruction of the states of Israel and
South Korea and ‘the victory of the righteous Japanese empire’.[9] The
blog’s account of the 4.3 incident (including Ramseyer’s figure of a
remaining population of 30,000) comes in its entirely from the Japanese version
of Wikipedia. Wikipedia in turn attributes this information to a dead link. The
author of the blog does point out, in his own note, that the Wikipedia figures
must be wrong, given that the population of Jeju in 1960 was 340,000,10
but either this note has been added since Professor Ramseyer consulted the
blog, or otherwise he didn’t manage to read to the bottom of the page. Either
way, it seems remarkable that a Harvard Professor should rely for a crucial
piece of statistical evidence on Wikipedia-via-an-anonymous-blog without
bothering to fact check, and equally remarkable that an international peer reviewed
journal was incapable of finding peer reviewers with the expertise to spot this
mistake.
Other key sources for Professor
Ramseyer’s discussion of Koreans in postwar Japan further undermine the
credibility of his account. Two key works, cited repeatedly in the article, are
Bandō Tadanobu’s book The Special
Privileges and Crimes of Koreans in Japan[10], which is
cited seven times and is the source of
Ramseyer’s unverified statements on contemporary Korean
welfare dependency
(Bandō 2016), and Suganuma Mitsuhiro’s South Korea: The Product of Yakuza and
Prostitutes (Suganuma 2015) which is a source for his discussion of postwar
‘Korean violence’ and crime rates. Did the titles of these sources not ring
even faint alarm bells in the minds of peer reviewers, whether or not they were
experts on Japan?
Bandō Tadanobu is a
far-right former police interpreter best known for his blogs energetically
attacking ‘foreigner crime’. His website offers readers (for a small
subscription fee) inside information about the ‘unacceptable thought and
behaviour’ of Chinese people, so that concerned members of the Japanese public
can learn how to identify and avoid those who ‘have dealings with Chinese’,
‘employ Chinese people’ or ‘rent houses or rooms to Chinese’.[11]
Suganuma is a former member of Japan’s
security police whose book offers various pieces of police
gossip about yakuza, kisaeng (the Korean version of geisha) etc. in support of its
author’s core argument, which is that, ever since the time of Woodrow Wilson’s
presidency, the US has deliberately created and orchestrated anti-Japanese
sentiment in Korea in order to destroy the Japanese empire and weaken the
Japanese state.[12]
Listing mistakes in other people’s
writings can turn into a tedious and nit-picking exercise. We all make mistakes
sometimes – the issue is the frequency of the mistakes and the extent to which
they affect the reliability of the overall conclusions of the research. Rather
than attempting to list all the other more minor errors in Professor Ramseyer’s
article, therefore, I invite readers to see how many mis-spellings of names,
mis-romanizations of Japanese, typographical errors, obviously incomplete or
incorrect referencing or mistakes of pagination, etc., they can find in
Professor Ramseyer’s reference list. My count is 31, but I think it very likely
that I have missed some.
It is, though, worth pointing out a few
of the more mystifying mistakes. Professor Ramseyer has apparently spent more
than twenty years as a professor of Japanese legal studies without discovering
that the well-known Japanese publisher which he repeatedly references as
‘Akaishi’ or ‘Akaishi Shoten’ is actually called ‘Akashi Shoten’, or that the
Japanese pronunciation of the characters for Jeju Island is
‘Saishūtō’ not ‘Zaishuto’. More mystifying still is his
citation of a 2017 book by the Sankei Newspaper Interview Team (Sankei Shimbun Shuzaidan). The Sankei Shimbun is a leading right-wing
Japanese newspaper and a major promoter of Professor
Ramseyer’s work. In April 2021, it was a key sponsor of a
symposium by prominent
Japanese right-wing activists, whose sole focus was
praising and propagating Ramseyer’s views on wartime history and minorities in
Japan. The symposium was co-sponsored by the lobby groups Nadeshiko Action (aka
‘Japanese Women for Justice and Peace’) – on whose ideas and activities see
Hills 2017 and Kim-Watchuka 2019 – and the International Research Institute of
Controversial Histories, whose view of the past and present can be found on its
English-language website[13]. In
return, Professor Ramseyer gave fulsome thanks to the Sankei Newspaper in his
address to the symposium.[14]
In the list of references at the end of
‘Social Capital and the Problems of Opportunistic
Leadership’, Professor Ramseyer cites the Sankei book as being authored by ‘Shimbun, S.’ (Ramseyer 2021, p. 31) –
the equivalent of citing a work
by a team of reporters from the Washington Post, and then
listing it in your references as being authored by ‘Post, W.’
6. Professor Ramseyer’s Erratum
In response to the concerns raised by researchers, the European Journal
of Law and Economics subsequently published an erratum by Professor Ramseyer.
In this, he acknowledged that he had misquoted Sonia Ryang and had given
incorrect citations for the Sankei Shimbun and Akashi Shoten. He also
acknowledged that his population figures for Jeju were incorrect, but failed to
provide any accurate estimate of the figures, leaving readers unaware of the
extent to which this mistake undermined the arguments in his original article.
The erratum also contained a new paragraph concerning the recruitment of
Koreans to wartime labour which had evidently not been checked by anyone with
expert knowledge of the subject, since it contained further serious historical
inaccuracies which remain uncorrected to this day (Ramseyer 2021c).
Meanwhile, Professor Ramseyer was also publishing material on another
social minority in Japan which has faced a long history of discrimination: the
group generally known as Hisabetsu Burakumin. As the comments of numerous
leading scholars in the filed have made clear, his approach to scholarship in
these publications precisely mirrored the approach which he used in his article
on Zainichi Koreans (see, for example, Neary 2021 and Fujino, Komori and Okada
2021).16 He continues to use the same approach to historical
truthfulness in his discussions of minority issues in Japan to the present
day.
7. Peer Review as Ethics
Professor Ramseyer’s article shows that ‘Koreans who went
to Japan during the imperial era could not read or write, add or subtract’, and
that ‘their intention was to come to Japan for a few years to make money, and
then return home, so they made no effort assimilate into Japanese society and
created conflict with the Japanese’ etc.
16 See, for example, Ian Neary, ‘Professor Mark Ramseyer
and the Buraku question: An introduction’, The Asia-
Pacific
Journal Japan Focus. 19(9) 2, 2021, https://apjjf.org/2021/9/Neary.html
(accessed 11 January 2022); Fujino
Yutaka, Komori Megumi and Okada Kimiko, ‘Crucial Fallacies in “On the invention
of identity politics the Buraku outcastes in Japan” by J. Mark Ramseyer /
J.Mark Ramseyer “On the invention of identity politics the Buraku outcastes in
Japan’, The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus. 19(9) 2, 2021, https://apjjf.org/2021/9/fujino-okada-komori (accessed 11 January 2022) and other articles in the
same special issue.
Furthermore, while ‘Japanese landlords avoided renting
houses to Koreans’, he [Ramseyer] explains that this is because Koreans were
often unsanitary and often drank a lot of alcohol or quarreled and made loud
noises…
In fact, what this Harvard professor says is what we
conservative patriots have been saying for a long time. The left wing claimed
that this was just historical revisionism spread by right-wing bloggers and
that it was false etc., but it was no mistake, because it is what is being said
by an eminent scholar who has conducted academic research.
Those Koreans love authority figures, so they like to point
to this or that Tokyo University professor etc. But when a Harvard professor
says it, the gap in status is just too great to be denied: in terms of ranking,
the gap in status is too great.
For us [conservative patriots], it is a cause of rejoicing
that the falsehoods of the Koreans have now been exposed. [15]
Within a week of the online publication
of ‘Social Capital and the Problems
of Opportunistic Leadership’, messages like the one quoted above were being
gleefully disseminated throughout the Japanese blogosphere. (On this
blogosphere, see Hall 2021). The author
of this particular comment, Seto
Hiroyuki, is the chief advisor to the Japan First Party (Nippon Dai-Ichi Tō), a body founded by extreme right activist
Sakurai Makoto, whose protest movement Zaitokukai is known for holding noisy
antiforeign resident demonstrations with slogans such as ‘Kill Koreans’ (Ghosh
2013) If the interpretations of Ramseyer’s work by people like Seto could
just be dismissed as misquotations, they might easily be ignored. But are they
misquotations? (Compare the quoted passage above with Ramseyer 2021, pp. 14, 16
and 23).
Articles like the one published by the European Journal of Law and Economics,
as its author is perfectly well aware, have effects that go way beyond the
seminar rooms of Chicago and Cambridge, Mass. Indeed, the enthusiasm with which
he has communicated the findings of his recent articles to sections of the
Japanese media and blogosphere, ably assisted by the Sankei Newspaper, indicates that a major aim of these articles was
to reach a certain wider audience. The scope and nature of this cooperation is
indicated, for example, by the content of Ramseyer 2020, Ramseyer 2021b, and
Nishioka 2021, all published in Japan
Forward, a news and opinion blog produced by the Sankei media group. It is
also evident from Ramseyer’s address to the ‘Emergency Symposium on the
Historical Controversy about the Ramseyer Essay’18. Conveying
academic research to the public is an important task for scholars, but it
carries with it the responsibilities of academic integrity and accuracy.
Like viral fragments in water,
disembodied phrases about crime, deviance and dysfunction swirl through
society, ending end up in streets and tweets, in playgrounds and classrooms.
They are picked up by flag-waving demonstrators, who resurrect groundless 1923
rumours about the crimes of ‘recalcitrant Koreans’[16]
(Nishimura and
Kitano 2020) and who tell fourth and fifth generation
Zainichi Koreans to ‘go home’ (Kim-Watchuka 2019; Hall 2021, pp. 49‒51). They
lodge themselves in the consciousness of young Zainichi Koreans, who are torn
between the effort to come to terms with and express their ethnic identity, and
the fear of being humiliated as ‘dysfunctional’, ‘unhygienic’, ‘criminal’ etc.
if they dare to use their real names (see, for example, Fukuoka 2000, 84‒86;
Mainichi Shimbun 2021). I have encountered at first hand the devastation that
this can wreak on the lives of young Koreans in Japan, as they struggle to sort
out their identities in a complex and conflict-ridden world. And of course, the
psychological damage can cut both ways – some Koreans, offended by such
academically unsubstantiated insults, launch into tirades against ‘the
Japanese’, which can inflict psychological harm on Japanese people who have no
responsibility for disseminating messages like the one I have quoted above. Meanwhile, some Japanese and Koreans from all
walks of life – including Zainichi Koreans, members of Japan’s indigenous Ainu
community and others – have been working tirelessly to promote better mutual
understanding amongst ethnic and social groups (for example, Tonohira 2025; see
also https://www.sasanobohyo.com/). It is sad to
see these remarkable efforts being undermined by skewed and misleading writings
from those in privileged academic positions.
This is not a plea for some bland
political correctness that avoids mentioning difficult bits of the past for
fear of offending people. If Professor Ramseyer wishes to write a serious
criticism of the Zainichi Korean political movements of the 1950s (for
example), or of the ‘opportunistic leadership’ of Sōren, he is entirely at liberty to do so, as long he writes it
with proper respect for his sources, his research subjects, his readers, and
the facts.
But where is the respect – for sources,
for human subjects of research, for readers or for facts – in this ‘contribution
to law and economics’?
The multiple errors of fact,
referencing, use of source material etc. in this article go beyond the article
itself, and highlight wider issues in the state of academic publishing and peer
review processes as a whole. Peer review is crucial, not just to ensure
wellinformed academic debate, but for ethical reasons. It is as vital in the
humanities and social sciences as it is in fields like medicine and psychology
to ensure that careless and flawed research does not slip through the cracks in
the system to cause social harm and human suffering. While this response does
not allow space for a fuller discussion of this crucial issue, a far-reaching
debate on the present and future of peer
review, by academics, publishers, and national and
international academic bodies such as ALLEA is well overdue. I believe that the
debate surrounding Professor Ramseyer’s article can serve as a valuable case-study
to be used in this debate. A rethinking, strengthening and improvement of the
system is certainly long overdue.
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[1] ‘The Future of Peer
Review’, on the website of the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and
Humanities (ALLEA), https://allea.org/the-future-of-peer-review/
(accessed 4 June 2021).
[2] Defined here as those with
Korean nationality.
[3] See the table ‘Kokuseki
Chiiki Betsu, Zairyū Shikaku (Zairyū Mokuteki) Betsu Zairyū Gaikokujin’, July
2020, on the statistical webpage of the Japanese government - https://www.e-stat.go.jp/statsearch/files?page=1&layout=datalist&toukei=00250012&tstat=000001018034&cycle=1&year=20190&month=
24101212&tclass1=000001060399 (retrieved
8 June 2021)
[4] Abe is quoting Richard H.
Mitchell, The Korean Community in Japan,
Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1967, p. 43.
[5] It is likely that the
figure was in fact somewhat higher than this.
[6] Similar restrictions
applied to most of the Japanese repatriates from the empire who returned to
Japan during the period; see Watt 2009; Ivings 2018, p. 172
[7] See ‘Kokuseki Chiiki
Betsu, Zairyū Shikaku (Zairyū Mokuteki) Betsu Zairyū Gaikokujin’, July 2020, on
the statistical webpage of the Japanese government - https://www.e-stat.go.jp/statsearch/files?page=1&layout=datalist&toukei=00250012&tstat=000001018034&cycle=1&year=20190&month=
24101212&tclass1=000001060399 (retrieved
8 June 2021) .
[8] The word “Korean’ here had
been blacked out by the censor.
[9] https://blog.goo.ne.jp/princeofwales1941/e/121e540464299e4ea3fd6578ad994fa8 (accessed
10 May 2022). 10 https://blog.goo.ne.jp/princeofwales1941/e/4195ed4bcd31d5e71dbde3d3c710e8f4 (retrieved
15 February 2021).
[10] The term ‘special
privileges’ is widely used in anti-Korean literature and activism in Japan.
See, for example, Hall 2021, p. 49.
[11] See Bandō’s personal
website - http://bandoutadanobu.com/ (retrieved 7 June 2021)
[12] An abbreviated version of
these arguments can be heard in this 2014 interview with Suganuma: https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm23819605 (retrieved 6 June 2021)
and in this video discussion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPWFeyAhP-I (retrieved 7 June 2021).
[13] For further information
on this body, see its website - https://en.i-rich.org/ )
[14] See the program and video
recording of the ‘Emergency Symposium on the Historical Controversy about the
Ramseyer Essay’, co-sponsored
by Nadeshiko Action, the International Research Institute of Controversial
Histories and the Sankei newspaper,
Tokyo, 24 April 2021 http://nadesiko-action.org/?p=15792 (retrieved 27 April 2021).
[15] See ‘Hābādo Daigaku Kyōju
– Chōsenjin wa Kane to tame ni Nihon e’, (‘Koreans came to Japan for Money’ –
Harvard University Professor) Seto
Hiroyuki BLOG Nihon yo doko e? (Seto Hiroyuki Blog – Whither Japan) http://blog.livedoor.jp/the_radical_right/archives/53380706.html (retrieved
7 June 2021) 18 http://nadesiko-action.org/?p=15792 (retrieved 27 April 2021).
[16] ‘Futei Senjin’ in Japanese – an expression widely used in the
colonial era: ‘futei’ meaning
‘recalcitrant’ or ‘malcontent’, and ‘Senjin’
being a discriminatory term for ‘Korean’.
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