INTERVIEW | J Mark Ramseyer and Jason Morgan Discuss Comfort Women Research and Academic Fortitude

In an exclusive interview with JAPAN Forward, J Mark Ramseyer and Jason Morgan, authors of The Comfort Women Hoax, delve into comfort women research and the challenges facing academia today. Ramseyer is the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. Morgan is a professor at Reitaku University in Japan. The two discuss their journey of uncovering hidden facts amidst academic suppression and ideological opposition.

Interviewed following the Third International Comfort Women Symposium in Tokyo, the two shared insights gained from their contact with other international scholars.  They emphasized the importance of open dialogue, rigorous scholarship, and academic integrity in addressing historical controversies. 

Excerpts follow.

'The Comfort Woman Hoax'

You recently published a book together, 'The Comfort Women Hoax.' What criticisms have arisen since it was published?

Ramseyer: It was nonstop for two and a half years, just regularly posting all kinds of attacks [by critics]. They wrote this 30-page attack on my eight-page article. Then these critics found out we had a book coming out [so they attacked that, too]. It hadn't come out yet, so they hadn't even read it.

And then the book came out, and it was just (silence). A friend at Harvard Law School said well, people are distracted with other stuff now such as the war in Gaza. 

Morgan: I think the fact that they were distracted by things going on cuts both ways. We live in the same world they do and could have been distracted, too. The fact that they just dropped their weapons and moved on to the next battlefield tells me that they were never serious in the first place.

Could you explain the connection between comfort women activist groups and North Korea that you note in your book?

Ramseyer: As I was writing it, I was surprised at how cleanly [the North Korean connection] came through, how very straightforward it was, and how much evidence there was. I had heard that there was this connection, and people had talked about it. But once I started looking into it, it was very clear. 

Morgan: The paper that Mark Ramseyer wrote with Dr Testuo Arima, "The North Korean Connection," to me was revelatory. After that, I started to notice other connections with foreign entities inside the United States. Code Pink is one, for example. There are also the people who brought the comfort women statue to San Francisco and the groups inside California pushing this issue.

I think the comfort women issue works very well as a smokescreen or as a kind of numbing agent for the rational intellect. If you dare to look behind the smokescreen at what the people are pushing, you're immediately called a white supremacist, rape apologist, or Holocaust denier. You realize something is going on behind this smokescreen. 

The North Korean connection, as Mark just said, is obvious. There is also the connection to the Chinese Communist Party through Code Pink. 

How do you view organizations like the Korean Council compared to their stated goals of supporting comfort women?

Ramseyer: Maybe I shouldn't say this, but I find [former council head] Yoon Mee Hyang stealing from the Korean Council amusing. Her stealing in terms of whether the comfort women story is true is neither here nor there. She comes across in all that she's been doing for the last 30 years as an incredibly dishonest manipulator. So it's hard not to smile when I hear about it. 

Morgan: I'm not surprised at all. [On the other hand,] American scholars refuse to listen to people in Asia who are talking about what's going on in their own countries. They think they can dictate historical terms to the rest of the world. Scholars in Japan and South Korea have been writing about this for decades, and they've just completely ignored it.

Western Centrism in Japan Studies

Where does academic freedom come into the discourse on the comfort women issue?

Morgan: Freedom of speech and academic freedom are very important, but they are not abstract concepts. You have to win them on the battlefield, and you win the battle by fighting it. Mark [went through] three years of living hell and death threats. I think what would have hurt me the most was knowing that people I thought were my friends were signing petitions to have me fired and have my work rejected.

Ramseyer: That's exactly right. People treating me as a pariah is what hurt me. I thought they knew me, that I wasn't a racist or a white supremacist. Academic freedom has to be won battle by battle. 

How has the West approached Eastern scholarship on the comfort women issue?

Ramseyer: When I started doing research, I was quickly impressed with how bad American scholarship about Japan was. It's astonishing how appalling it is. Exactly as Jason says, there's no respect for Japanese scholars who are obviously brighter and know the material [better than] our field in the US.

[Many of them believe] the center of the study of Japan and Japanese history is in the West. Until Japanese scholars learn to write in English, they're really not going to count. The arrogance is really something.

Morgan: My former advisor at the University of Wisconsin, Louise Young, wrote a paper that was published in a peer-reviewed journal. [In her paper] she said that scholarship written in English is basically the center of Japanese studies. [She also said] Japanese scholars should learn to write in English if they want to be accepted worldwide.

Mark Ramseyer and myself have been called white supremacists and fascists who are advancing a far-right agenda. Look at the symposium today. The only two people here who are not from East Asia are the two of us. We are the dwindling minority among scholars who have been working on this for decades. To focus solely on Mark Ramseyer and myself as though we are pushing this entire field of research is astonishingly racially blind. It ignores the extensive work being done in countries with hundreds of millions of people, where scholars are continuously writing books and articles in non-English languages.

Academics From the Three Most-Involved Nations

What were your impressions of the Third International Comfort Women Symposium?

Ramseyer: It made things very clear with respect to comfort women's situation, the state of the research, and the extent of the research, which I thought was really compelling.

Morgan: When I first heard about this symposium, I thought, "This is how it should have been from the beginning." 

Having people who are devoting their time to researching this get in the same room and share opinions. When we tried this in the US or with the Heterodox Academy, we were called denialists and all sorts of things. However, the way to advance scholarship is to get in the same room and talk to each other.

I would have loved to have people in the room who had completely opposite views and hash things out. This is what scholars do.

It was historic that we had people from three countries in the same room sharing facts about history. We were not yelling and shouting at each other, but hashing out what really happened in the past. It was an ideal setting. That's how it should be.

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Author: Daniel Manning