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Published: March 2, 2021, 12:39 p.m.

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We discuss the unfolding row over an academic article by Harvard law professor Mark Ramseyer, who argues, without evidence, that \\u201ccomfort women\\u201d across Asia were not coercively indentured by the Japanese imperial army in World War II, but had legally consented to sex work. (For background on this debate, check out Tammy\\u2019s paper from 2006!)

Though typically irrelevant to the rest of society (lol), Ramseyer\\u2019s is the rare academic paper to invite public attention and, subsequently, outrage. His bizarrely unsourced work has triggered questions about Japan\\u2019s wartime responsibilities, unfree labor, sexual slavery, and ongoing geopolitical tensions in East Asia. And also, as Jeannie Suk Gersen, Ramseyer\\u2019s colleague, wrote last week in The New Yorker, the struggle at Harvard?\\xa0

Thousands of scholars have spoken out against the article, including five historians of Japan (and friend of the show Chelsea Szendi Schieder) who compiled an extensive list of Ramseyer\\u2019s errors and mistakes\\u2014far longer than the original paper! (N.b., economists have denounced the piece, as have groups at Harvard.)

* History of the \\u2018comfort women\\u2019 question 101, starting in the 1990s, thanks to the public testimony of survivor Kim Hak-sun and the support of historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki

* What does this story mean, especially, to those in Korea and the Korean diaspora?\\xa0

* What does it tell us about legal academia, the prestige of Harvard, and how TF it could get published in the first place?

* What is going on with the far-right in Japan? (cf. friend of show Adam Bronson\\u2019s piece on Abe Shinz\\u014d in Dissent)

* Why should people in the US, or around the world, care about a story seemingly confined to South Korea and Japan?

Good materials on the comfort women:

* Embodied Reckonings by Elizabeth Son

* Lolas\\u2019 House by M. Evelina Galang

* Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim

* A Cruelty to Our Species by Emily Jungmin Yoon

* Silence Broken by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson

* Comfort Women by Yoshimi Yoshiaki

* The Comfort Women by George Hicks

* Comfort Woman by Nora Ojka Keller

Some prints inspired by stories of the comfort women, by Tammy:

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