Harvard Law School Japanese legal studies professor J. Mark Ramseyer argues in a paper due to be published next month that it’s a myth that women were coerced into working as prostitutes for the Japanese Army in WWII.
Needless to say, this is not going over well. Critics are pointing out that the professor ignored a vast body of documentation from Korean sources and international scholarship, and suggesting that his relationship with Japanese government officials influenced his paper.
The paper’s abstract (available online) is disturbing enough; an editorial by Prof. Ramseyer is even more offensive.
Remember that textbook McGraw-Hill published for Texas claiming that enslaved people from Africa were immigrants and referred to them as “workers”? It’s never to late to polish up your image with some revisionist history.
Well then, it sounds like you’re saying the comfort women were sex workers rather than rape victims. If forced work is work and not enslavement, then forced sex is sex work, and not rape.
Maybe. You’d say, for instance, “the workers who built the Great Pyramid of Giza”, even if you don’t know if they were paid or not.
That is an excellent point. I think I’d say, very tentatively, that forced sex work is both sex work and rape, just like a field slave is both a worker and a victim of slavery. Saying that something is forced sex work does not, of course, diminish one whit from the crime, nor does it make the rape any less heinous.
In my experience, most folks said “the slaves who build the Pyramids” until it was discovered that they were paid workers. Until that, I’d only heard them referred to as slaves. In the context of slavery, the term “workers” is inappropriate unless making a distinction between say the workers and the overseers.
This is an area where one should defer to the professionals who have actually researched the primary evidence. It would appear the great majority of professionals vehemently disagree with this guy.
[Moderating] Jasmine, please be more cautious about correctly attributing quotes so that you don’t appear to be attributing really fucked up opinions to people who don’t hold them. Your post has been edited to remove the attribution to Jackmanii.
