Editor decides to keep Ramseyers’ controversial article on comfort women despite criticism

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This photo, taken from the Harvard Law School YouTube account, shows Professor J. Mark Ramseyer.

An editor of a leading academic journal has rejected a request to retract a controversial article, which claimed comfort women were voluntary prostitutes, although historians have agreed that the suggested evidence does not overturn the historical consensus that Korean women were forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military. .

Mark Ramseyer, Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, claimed that Korean women and Japanese brothels included indenture contracts that paired a large advance with terms of one or two years in his article titled Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War published in December. 2020.

The article has drawn widespread comment and criticism, including calls for retraction since its publication, the International Review of Law and Economics (IRLE) said in a statement released on Wednesday.

The four historians who have reviewed the article confidentially at the request of the editor are concerned about Professor Ramseyers’ interpretation of the evidence, and all agree that the evidence in his article does not justify the cancellation of the historic consensus, the IRLE admitted.

A 1996 UN human rights report is one of many notable documents that acknowledged the existence of comfort women and concluded that they had been military sex slaves for the Japanese military before and during the Second World War. But Japan disputed this finding and called for a review, which was denied.

But the publisher’s editors decided to keep Ramseyer’s paper based on guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which is an advisory board for editors tied to the integrity of the scientific record.

We have no evidence in any subsequent external comments or reviews that Professor Ramseyer is guilty of misconduct under the strict terms of the COPE guidelines, the IRLE said.

The key standard of judgment is whether Ramseyer’s interpretation and judgment of how he used the sources constitutes a qualitative error akin to a miscalculation or an experimental fault.

The editor explained that the editors cannot find anything that reaches the level of fabrication or falsification of clear data and the COPE description of honest error seems orthogonal to the current situation.

But the IRLE admitted that the editors had differing views on whether the paper should be retracted based on the guidelines while agreeing that the guidelines are clearly intended to present a high threshold for retraction.

The editors have instead decided to retain the expression of concern to the article, which informs readers that concerns have been raised about the historical evidence in the article.

But Eyal Winter, professor of economics at Lancaster University in the UK, said he found the paper seriously lacking in scientific rigor in his public comments which were made public on Monday.

It uses anecdotal evidence/stories to draw a general conclusion, and it makes important claims that are not supported by any reference, Winter said.

Ramseyer claimed that the prostitutes followed the armies everywhere, and they followed the Japanese army to Asia without providing any evidence or reference to support his claims in the article.

Should the reader be expected to take the general statement that prostitutes followed armies everywhere as an axiom? Winter wonders. And if so, isn’t the reader at least entitled to evidence to support the author’s unequivocal assertion that prostitutes in the days of comfort stations were always in glut? ?

Winter also pointed out that Ramseyer improperly justified the upfront payments made to comfort women by brothels. Winter said the upfront payments were not beneficial in comforting the women given that the payments were not irreversible, adding that Ramseyer also mentioned that when the girls left the brothel too soon, the brothel would charge compensation to their parents.

Winter also raised the possibility that brothels could exploit an up-front payment rule as a way to pay less or put women in debt, which would force them to stay in business.

By Ji Da-gyum ([email protected])

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