History

Academic Portal Sees Peak Interest in Paper on North Korea's Link to Comfort Woman Scam

Authored by J Mark Ramseyer and Tetsuo Arima, "Comfort Women: The North Korean Connection" is the No. 1 most-downloaded SSRN paper in its category of all time.

Published

2 years ago

October 15, 2022

Jason Morgan, Reitaku University

Former South Korean President Moon Jae In with a South Korean comfort woman on August 14, 2018, the same year the South Korean government designated the date as "Comfort Women Day."

On August 8, 2022, Waseda University Professor Tetsuo Arima and Harvard Law School Professor J Mark Ramseyer uploaded "Comfort Women: The North Korean Connection," to the academic exchange portal Social Science Research Network (SSRN).

In the paper, the two scholars work from a bevy of archival and other documentary evidence to show how the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — more specifically, the Kim dictatorship in Pyongyang, and those in South Korea, Japan, and the United States sympathetic to the North Korean regime — manipulates the comfort woman scam for political gain.

As of this writing, "Comfort Women: The North Korean Connection" is the number one most-downloaded SSRN paper in its category of all time. Its category: History Research Network: Subject Matter eJournals. It is currently No. 5 on the most-downloaded list for the past 60 days, and in September ranked as high as No. 3 overall.

*Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang with samples of his missiles. (Korean Central News Agency via Kyodo)*

How the Scam Benefits North Korea

Professors Arima and Ramseyer write in their paper that "an apparently corrupt organization [inside South Korea] with close ties to North Korea (the leader's husband served prison time for passing documents to a North Korean agent) took control of the comfort-women movement."

This North Korea-linked organization in South Korea, the professors continue, then "inflamed the ethno-nationalism within South Korea and stalled rapprochement with Japan."

All of this took place, the professors add, while North Korea was developing its nuclear weapons program. The comfort woman scam was a convenient cover for such activities.

Continuing to Climb

Professors Arima and Ramseyer’s 63-page paper tops nearly 4,000 other papers in its category, and outstrips the No. 2 paper by more than 800 downloads. The Arima-Ramseyer paper on North Korea outdoes the other Top 10 papers in the category in download numbers by an average factor of 2.01.

The paper has been downloaded more than 6,000 t imes as of this writing, and is rapidly approaching 21,000 abstract views.

As North Korea continues to launch missiles and expand its nuclear capabilities, and as more and more scholars in Japan, South K orea, the United States, and elsewhere expose the comfort women scam as fake history, it is likely that professors Arima and Ramseyer's SSRN paper will continue to garner heavy interest among academics and the concerned public.