"Comfort women are prostitutes"... How Harvard Professor Becomes a Monster

● "The story of sex slaves is pure fiction"...

Harvard Professor's Provocation The

fantasy of Harvard, the best university in the United States, is strong not only in our country, but also in the United States.

It is true that the premium of Harvard Law School is strong, especially in the United States, where lawyers are in various professions.

There have also been many articles describing that Justice Barrett, who was appointed as the successor to the deceased Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg, was unconventional because he was not from Harvard and Yale Law School.

Because of the authority that comes from the name of Harvard Law School, it is true that in the United States, the professors are listening more to what they say and write.

Harvard Law School Professor Ramsey's provocation is a very serious problem.

<Contracting for sex in the Pacific War>, a paper published in the journal (It will be officially published in March, but the online PDF version is still available for about $35.) <Recovering the truth> about the comfort women> is the subject of controversy.

The main topic of the content is quite the same, but the article published in the Japan Forward is directed to the public, so Professor Ramsey's instinct is more honest.

At the beginning and end, it says, "The story of a comfort woman sex slave is a complete novel."

The thesis took out a contract theory based on game theory to prove this.

Professor Ramsey explains that a prostitute who wants to make a lot of money and a prospective prostitute who wants to avoid prostitutes as hard as possible have signed an employment contract to meet the conflicting interests.

Under this contract, women claimed that they received a high amount of advance payment on the condition of working one or two years, and that if they made enough money, they could leave before the contract expires.

If Japanese far-rights write such pathetic texts, the answer would be to simply ignore them, but the root of the problem can be said to be much deeper in that the other person is a professor at the most prestigious university in the United States.

It's no small thing that Harvard's official thesis published an absurd lie that girls of flowery age were dragged into war and were sexually exploited, in fact, they only signed prostitution contracts to earn money.

To confirm the problem with Professor Ramsey's thesis and contributions, we video interviewed Professor Ji-Young Seok of Harvard Law School and Professor Alexis Durdon of the University of Connecticut Department of History.

Video conferencing technology has advanced so much, and as people have become accustomed to video interviews with Corona, it was easy to hear the stories of two people in places in the United States that could hardly be interviewed in a day.

While the backlash from Harvard students continues, it is worth noting that the Harvard faculty community is also upbeat.

In particular, Professor Ji-Young Seok posted his thoughts on Twitter about the problems of Professor Ramsey's contributions and thesis in 13 categories.

Professor Seok can be described as'the god of study' in Korean expression.

In Korea, there are books such as <The World I Wanted to See> and <Rediscovery of the Law>, which is a popular figure.

I dreamed of becoming a ballerina, I attended the Juilliard School of Music Preparatory School, studied at Yale University, Oxford University, and received a JD from Harvard University.

He has also worked as a prosecutor in Manhattan, New York City, and Clerk of Supreme Court Justice David Suter.

The first Asian woman to become a full-time professor at Harvard Law School was in 2010, when she was only 38 years old.

Parents with daughters have achieved so much academic achievement that they want to become role models.

As soon as I saw Professor Seok's post on Twitter, I sent an e-mail, and a response came back saying that I would have an interview the next day.

It hasn't been a while since I posted on Twitter, so it seems that I wanted to inform Korean viewers of what I was thinking about the victims of comfort women.

Professor Seok, like a legal expert, pointed out the problems of the prostitution contract, which Professor Ramsey said.

Contrary to human free will, contracts made under pressure are not contracts.

Professor Ramsey seems to want to argue that there was no coercion, but based on historical records and the testimony of survivors, he says he can't see it that way.

Prof. Ji-young Seok wrote this part in detail on Twitter, and Ramsay knows that thousands and women who have to engage in prostitution cannot escape until they fulfill their'duty', which in other words is called a'slave contract'. I did.

After experiencing a traumatic event, the perpetrator tends to forget it and try to glorify it, and this incident was also analyzed in that respect.

It is an attempt to keep forgetting and glorifying war crimes.

Professor Seok put great emphasis on academic freedom, and while Ramsey's argument was absurd, he insisted that it should be protected at that level.

(The opposition was clear to the argument that Professor Ramsay should be disciplined.) However, the UN and Amnesty International have already acknowledged that the victims of comfort women were forced to mobilize by the Japanese imperialism, and the Japanese government also spoke of Kono. It was accepted through the back, but Professor Ramsey explained that there was no basis for overturning it.

Since I wrote the thesis on the basis of no persuasion, I evaluated it as'a failed study' in a word.

Professor Seok said that after refuting Prof. Ramsey openly, he communicated to the parties directly why he could not agree.

When I asked him what was Professor Ramsey's reaction, he replied that he hadn't responded yet and that it was his right to do so.

Professor Seok was given the impression that he thought about the words one by one while talking slowly and slowly, but he seemed to be trying to speak the level of his anger in an appropriate line as he was criticized by a fellow professor.

He added that he fully supports and supports students for raising up and making statements.

From the start, Professor Durdon of the Department of History at the University of Connecticut was impressed with a very kind person.

If I had been interviewed in the lab, I would have been interviewed by serving coffee or sweets first, but I started saying that it was unfortunate that I saw the video.

I had an interview for nearly 50 minutes, and it felt like listening to a history lecture on Professor Ramsey's thesis.

I pointed out the origins and problems of the thesis from a historical point of view, but I learned a lot that I did not know at all.

It was also curious that an American professor, who was not of Korean origin, is so interested in Japanese and Korean history, and there are people who know it well.

Professor Durdon said he attended Professor Ramsey's class at the University of Chicago in the mid-90s.

I was a history major, but I took a Japanese law lecture and explained that it was very helpful.

Even then, when Professor Ramsay asked if he had ever spoken about the victims of comfort women, he replied that he had never done so.

But Professor Ramsey was a legal theorist trained in economics, so he drew a line that this field of history is not a specialty.

Professor Durden repeatedly stressed that his criticism was never on a personal level, and explained that he still had a good relationship with him and Professor Ramsey.

Professor Ramsey said that in December of last year, when the paper was published on the Internet, he sent the paper directly to Professor Durdon by e-mail.

Ramsey's contributions and dissertations should be viewed as a whole different level of matter, Durden explained.

He said that he thought he was talking about his own opinion and that he could think of it as fake news from Fox News or Breit Bart in the United States.

However, he emphasized that what is published in academic journals, which is the domain of scholars, is completely different.

He said he knew that few people read academic papers (so he laughed at knowing that people were teasing him), but he was astonished at the fact that these false facts were found in academic papers containing only strict facts.

He stressed that the whole paper was full of errors and mistakes, so it should not be published as an academic paper.

Professor Durdon stressed that it was questionable whether this paper had been properly'peer reviewed'.

He said several times that he would have prevented the publication of this paper if he had reviewed it.

When he saw Professor Ramsey's article in the Japan Forward, he said he felt horror.

When Ramsey said that the story of the war sex slavery of the comfort women victims was a complete novel, he replied that it was a shock to be able to use such a sentence.

The fact that Ramsay's claim is not true is that there are so many documents from the Japanese government, there is evidence that exists, and there is vivid testimony of the incident at the time, how can you say that?

Of course, it was said that there could be comfort women who signed a contract even in war.

But I asked how much that ratio would be.

With some literary records and historical records (most of the references in Professor Ramsey's thesis are from Japan. The data of some Korean authors appearing in the references are mostly problem books used to distort comfort women). He asked whether it makes sense to adapt it and generalize that all comfort women victims were actually prostitutes.

Professor Durden sighed throughout the interview, but he felt sad and embarrassed.

Professor Durdon also said that it was too absurd to say that Ramsay had signed a prostitution contract with only Korean comfort women victims in his thesis.

Japan forcibly mobilized comfort women victims in many places in East Asia, including Taiwan, the Philippines, China, Indonesia, and Vietnam, but it was regrettable that it had turned them into a smackdown between Korea and Japan.

This is not only dishonest, but he has raised his voice that it should not be done in the academic field.

Professor Durdon told me to put this into the black slave problem.

If a slave trader in Africa brought a black man to slavery and wrote a contract, would this be considered a contract?

Like Professor Seok Ji-young, Professor Durdon criticized the Ramsay thesis for terribly arbitrary interpretation of the meaning of the contract.

Professor Durden said the most upsetting was that some right-wingers were abusing Professor Ramsey's thesis.

Using the Harvard name value, he expressed great concern about saying,'This paper was written by Professor Harvard, so it is correct, and everything else is false.'

The Japanese also lamented that it was unfair to come to believe this is true.

He also conveyed the atmosphere that Harvard's fellow professors and students he knew were shocked because he had done so hard on Harvard's name.

Several times I asked Professor Ramsay, who published the paper in question, to do an interview.

Crimson, a Harvard textbook, even said he was willing to talk to the students about his thesis, but eventually declined the request for an SBS interview.

I made several phone calls to the office and kept sending e-mails, eventually receiving an answer, but at first I stubbornly refused, and later, I was adamant, "I don't interview."

He even wrote a dissertation on a controversial topic, but it was disappointing to avoid the press interview itself.

Watching this incident, I felt the indifference of the American media to the victims of comfort women.

Of course, there is no controversy in the situation as there is an unfolding interest in the Trump impeachment trial.

However, the other Korean-Japanese conflict is a fight between the parties, and the US media may be missing one step, but the issue of the comfort women victimized grandmother is at the heart of the universal human rights issue, and it is disappointing that most of the US mainstream media do not even mention this. .

Until now, I was regretful that the human rights movement for victims of comfort women was too late for domestic use.

In line with the inauguration of the Biden government, which has a lot of interest in human rights issues, it seems that the Korean government should also consider more so that the voices of organizations that are engaged in the human rights movement for comfort women victims abroad can be heard.