Ramseyer Warns of Collapse in Japanese Studies

On a cool summer evening, high in the Nagano mountains, Harvard Law School Professor J Mark Ramseyer, PhD, is hardly in a typical academic setting. Tongs in hand, he tends a barbecue grill at a lakeside cottage while chatting amiably.

As the sun sinks behind the trees, Dr Ramseyer laughs easily and shares stories from his life in Japan and the United States. This down-to-earth scene – colleagues gathered around a picnic table, the air scented with grilled yakitori and woodsmoke – humanizes a man better known for igniting fierce debates in Japanese studies. Here, the Ramseyer we meet is a gracious host in jeans and sandals, not just the renowned scholar from Harvard.

The next morning, he settles into a wooden chair on the cottage's porch to begin the formal interview. The view is postcard perfect: mist lifting off the lake, pine-covered slopes stretching into the distance. Ramseyer, relaxed in this bucolic setting, reflects on the journey that led him to some of Japan's most contentious historical issues.

Now in his late 60s, he occupies an unusual perch in academia – an American-born expert on Japanese law who was raised in rural Miyazaki, Japan, as the son of missionaries. Bicultural and fluent in Japanese, Ramseyer has never been afraid to challenge prevailing orthodoxies, including about Japan's wartime past. In person, his cordial warmth belies the steely resolve of a scholar who has weathered death threats and petitions for his firing.

A Loss of Expertise

There has been a gradual loss of serious expertise on Japan, particularly in American universities, Professor Ramseyer laments.

"Sixty years ago, American economists, political scientists, and sociologists were studying Japan — and they were pretty good," he said. "The humanities people were reading [Yukio] Mishima and [Yasunari] Kawabata and translating [The Tales of] Genji. But what's happened in the US universities over the last 60, 70 years is a gradual collapse of the humanities."

As disciplines shifted toward abstract theory, fewer scholars engaged deeply with Japanese sources. "There are very, very few people who read a Japanese source," Ramseyer observed. "It means less country-specific expertise in the social sciences, and a collapse in the humanities so severe it's now captured public attention."

*(Left) Professor J Mark Ramseyer (©JAPAN Forward)*

The imbalance is exacerbated, he added, by the politicization of certain historical issues. Left-wing groups in South Korea and elsewhere have promoted the "sex slave" narrative as part of their political agenda, he argued. This, he suggested, has contributed to the sharp reactions against his own research.

Challenging the Comfort Women Narrative

It was in the course of his broader legal-historical research that Ramseyer found himself drawn into the comfort women debate. Ramseyer's most controversial work challenges the narrative that comfort women during World War II were "sex slaves." Instead, he found that many were "very poor women" who, faced with limited options, "rationally chose prostitution" as "the least bad alternative."

"University professors often come from very comfortable upper-middle-class backgrounds," he said. "They have no instinctive connection to young women at the very bottom of the economic totem pole. If you're really poor and don't have marketable skills, sometimes prostitution is the least bad alternative. And that's been true in history."

He acknowledges the suffering of women in wartime but cautions against one-sided narratives. "Wars are really bad for women," he said, "but they're even worse for young men." With conscription, men are sent to the front lines, where many are killed. In his view, "the notion that wars are uniquely worse for women is a fad" — one he believes will eventually pass.

Ramseyer also allowed that some groups do deliberately push distorted histories and false narratives. He cited as one example Korean organizations with connections to North Korean espionage as having played a role in promoting the comfort women issue internationally.

Academic Freedom and Information Wars

Ramseyer has paid a price for such arguments. He recalls the petitions calling for his dismissal, including one with 30,000 signatures. "I would love if 3,000 people had read my article," he quipped, "but somehow 30,000 managed to sign [the petitions]." Even senior colleagues at Harvard joined petitions against him, some urging that unfounded Title IX claims, legal complaints alleging sex discrimination in education, be filed.

"The notion that full professors would sign petitions urging people to file bogus claims struck me as beyond the pale," he remarked.

Yet he returned to a principled defense of free expression. Wrongheaded professors, he argued, are still "protected by academic freedom," while politically connected groups using flawed studies are "protected by freedom of speech." In his view, "that's what democracy is about," and the only proper response is to call out what they are doing.

Countering Sensationalist History

Doing just that, and armed with his bilingual research, Ramseyer has recently contributed to a collective rebuttal of a controversial book by an American historian named Bryan Mark Rigg. Rigg's book, titled Japan's Holocaust, alleges the Imperial Japanese Army massacred 30 million civilians between 1927 and 1945.

Ramseyer dismissed the claims as "wildly distorted" and argued that such sensational accounts often reflect the aftershocks of wartime propaganda. "The United States fought Japan for five years," he noted. "When countries fight, they say all kinds of strange things about the other party. And given that the US won the war, winners write the history."

The problem is that such works often lack engagement with Japanese sources. "If there's five years of war and five years of hostile writing, it's not surprising that somebody who can't read anything but English would manage to put together something as unhinged as this book."

Ramseyer joined 19 other experts to produce a scholarly rebuttal. While uncertain how much influence the effort will have, he stressed the importance of responding: "If we thought people were going to take this [Riggs'] book seriously, we should throw everything at it. If it disappears in six months, then less needs to be done. At this point, it's hard to know."

Toward Constructive Dialogue

On the question of Japan's so-called "history wars," Ramseyer believes the problem is less with the US and more with Japan's neighbors. "The vast majority of Americans have no particular history war with Japan. The conflict is with South Korea and maybe China." His advice is simple: "Never apologize for something that's not true. Stick to what's true, and don't pay anything. This was all negotiated in 1965 in a treaty, and that's the end of it."

As for the media landscape, Ramseyer believes the decline of legacy outlets creates space for new voices. "It means enormous opportunities for places like JAPAN Forward, which is small but principled, and regularly publishes high-quality articles on focused topics. It's a perfect opportunity," he said.

For Ramseyer, the key lesson is clear — academic integrity requires both the courage to challenge narratives and a commitment to evidence. In the realm of contested history, the stakes extend beyond academic debates. As he put it, "If people are producing bad scholarship, then you point out as an academic that it's bad scholarship. That's to my mind the proper response."

Advice for Young Scholars

Ramseyer urges younger academics not to shy away from controversial research. Those trying to silence opposing views, he argues, "need to understand it won't work. Those of us who are politically disfavored will fight back, because we're right and they're wrong."

At the same time, he stresses the need for realism about career paths. History departments in the US, he warns, often shut out anyone who doesn't fit their ideological mold. "They might not even hire you if you're a modestly left-of-center liberal," he said. For that reason, he advises aspiring scholars to consider working "from some department other than history," such as law or economics, where space for dissenting voices still exists.

Author: Daniel Manning