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Washington, DC February 11, 2021 – The Board of Directors of Korean Americans for Political Action today unanimously denounced the paper, “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” written by Harvard Law School professor J. Mark Ramseyer.

Ramseyer, the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, asserts, according to his theory, that sex slaves taken by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II were in fact, voluntarily contracted workers who were not coerced.

The paper is scheduled to be published in the March issue of the International Review of Law and Economics, but Ramseyer allowed an abstract to be featured on January 28 in the Sankei Shimbum, an ultra-nationalistic Japanese newspaper.

“Ramseyer’s efforts to reverse engineer history with a flawed legal construct, is not only intellectually corrupt; it reveals a level of depravity for human life reflecting the pattern of behavior of the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II and still maintained by many in the Japanese government today,” said John Lim, Chair of the Board.

“It is easy to connect the dots and see that Ramseyer, who was raised in Japan, awarded the Order of the Rising Sun in 2018 for promoting Japanese culture abroad and has a title funded by an industrial giant who used POWs as forced laborers during World War II has written his article for a select audience in Japan. His admission that he disregarded any Korean historical or scholarly research because he doesn’t read Korean is further proof of his intention to produce a piece devoid of any facts.

Earlier this year, he published an article in the January 12 edition of the Japan Forward, the English-language sister publication of the Sankei Shimbum where he called the historical fact of forced sex slavery, “pure fiction.”

“This is no doubt part of an ongoing global offensive by the Japanese government to discredit efforts to create awareness of the plight of Korean comfort women through an alternative narrative that seeks to portray a different reality from the already extensively documented history, much of which are in Japanese archives. This absurd article mirrors the similar attempts by those who deny the Holocaust ever took place,” Lim concluded.

KAPA calls upon Harvard to return the reported approximately $1.5 million from Mitsubishi to prevent further “paid for” hit pieces that have little academic value that only bring Harvard’s reputation into question.

“It’s perversely ironic that Harvard and Ramseyer have entered into an arrangement with a Japanese company solely for the purpose of producing propaganda to benefit Japan. There are many words to describe this kind of consorting,” said KAPA Advisory Board member and former Congressman Mike Honda who introduced to Congress H.R. 121 which calls for Japan “to formally acknowledge, apologize and accept the historical responsibility for…coercion of young women into sexual slavery…..” Actions – H.Res.121 – 110th Congress (2007-2008): A resolution expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the Government of Japan should formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed Force’s coercion of young women into sexual slavery, known to the world as “comfort women”, during its colonial and wartime occupation of Asia and the Pacific Islands from the 1930s through the duration of World War II. | Congress.gov | Library of Congress

 

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The Korean Americans for Political Action is a national non-partisan 501(c)4 non-profit dedicated to motivating, organizing and supporting Americans of Korean descent to become more directly involved in the American political process to promote legislation and policies that benefit Korean Americans and the American society.

For more information, please contact David L. Kim at (202) 573-3380, email at info@kapaction.org, or visit the KAPA website at www.kapaction.org