Commentary | Paula R. Curtis, Taking the Fight for Japan's History Online
As a historian of premodern Japan active on Twitter, I seldom find myself embroiled in controversies in real time. I occasionally get pushback when I discuss the legacy of female emperors or nationalistic myths of ethnic homogeneity, but by and large, there’s little trouble. So when I retweeted an article in The New Yorker by Jeannie Suk Gersen on a contentious publication regarding comfort women in February of 2021, simply remarking “This is a fabulous summary of how this event unfolded across media and academic circles, also placing the major issues in historical perspective,” I hardly expected the backlash that followed. I did not anticipate the ferocious Twitter storm from historical denialists that came to absorb my life and the lives of my colleagues for months thereafter.
Far from existing solely in online spaces, the vicious attacks scholars (and their supporters) continue to endure are indicative of broader patterns of internet-based harassment that many academics have faced in the last decade, attacks that will continue to manifest and can affect the personal lives and professional careers of any academic or institution, regardless of their level of public engagement. In what follows, I outline how this particular controversy over Japan’s wartime atrocities unfolded, traveling from the digital pages of a journal into extremist online communities and, eventually, permeating the lives of digitally present academics.
As information wars rage across social media, it is imperative that researchers and their institutions take seriously the public-facing engagement and scholarship increasingly demanded of academics of all career stages, at schools large and small. We are in an era when “fake news” and the widespread distrust of higher education threaten to eclipse the work that academics do. Recent denialist stances on comfort women history and the fallout from their propagation in virtual spaces demonstrate that it is critical for humanities and social science professionals alike to understand digital modes of engagement, appreciate their real world implications, and fight for the integrity of knowledge. These are the tools with which educators can mobilize to combat persistent untruths, effectively serve the public, and fulfill our intellectual responsibilities as researchers and educators, whether the battlefield is on or offline.
“Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War” Across Media
On December 1, 2020, the digital version of a forthcoming article by J. Mark Ramseyer, Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard University, was quietly published online in the International Review of Law and Economics (IRLE). Entitled “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” this eight-page article argued that women enslaved for sex during World War II by the Japanese military — known euphemistically as “comfort women” — were all voluntary actors who entered into prostitution through a system of contracts they could freely leave after 1-2 years.
Ramseyer reiterated these claims in a January 12 op-ed in the far right news site JAPAN Forward, an English outlet of the conservative Sankei newspaper, in which he referred to the idea that comfort women were sex slaves as “pure fiction.” On January 28, Sankei itself ran a Japanese-language article that lauded Ramseyer as a “giant” of Japanese research, someone whose findings, “having passed through peer review by other specialist researchers,” have great significance to arguments that comfort women were never trafficked. Ramseyer’s assertions, which run counter to decades of historical scholarship and survivor testimonies, would not pass unnoticed for long.
News of these publications spread rapidly, first across Korean media outlets, then Japanese. Finally, they hit English-language media. As historians expressed their shock that such a paper ever saw the light of day, a swell of media coverage followed through February, March, and April, from CNN and The New York Times, to Vice and Jezebel. Two US Congresspeople expressed their anger on Twitter, calling Ramseyer’s work “untrue, misleading & disgusting,” as well as “misleading & deplorable”; the Chinese government reaffirmed their condemnation of denying war atrocities; academic and professional organizations including the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University and a coalition of fifty historical societies and organizations in Korea, among others, issued statements; over 3,000 professors of economics and law signed a letter of concern about the article’s misuse of theory to make unverifiable historical claims; and, on social media, scholars of Asia began to find one another and mobilize.
When news of Ramseyer’s article dropped, Twitter fast-tracked its circulation through academic circles. Almost immediately, researchers in Asian Studies who had seen one another tweet on the issue were in contact, emailing colleagues, and sharing a Google Doc fact-checking every citation in the original publication. One of the first scholarly refutations published was a devastating 36-page fact-check first released on February 18, “‘Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War’: The Case for Retraction on Grounds of Academic Misconduct” by Amy Stanley (Northwestern University), Hannah Shepherd (Yale University), Sayaka Chatani (National University of Singapore), David Ambaras (North Carolina State University), and Chelsea Szendi Schieder (Aoyama Gakuin University).
Exposing the paper’s lack of evidence and problematic research methods, the authors found that Ramseyer’s eight-page paper was riddled with historical inaccuracies, misrepresentations of sources, inaccurate references, missing citations, and unfounded claims. Some of Ramseyer’s sources were dubious right wing blogs rife with conspiracy theories. Perhaps most damningly, Ramseyer cited no evidence of extant contracts to support his argument that comfort women were contracted prostitutes, a point that he himself has admitted in interviews. It is unclear whether historians specializing in Japan served as peer reviewers for IRLE’s assessment of the article. Ensuing demands for accountability and for Ramseyer’s paper to be retracted from many academic corners caused as many ripples throughout the Twitterverse as had more public-facing news coverage. And so Ramseyer’s defenders came out in force.
Social Media and Japan’s Right Wing Ecosystem
Typical Twitter bio of a Neto Uyo. Translation: “I'm Japanese, and so it is only natural that I love Japan. Yamaguchi Prefecture is the best! I pay my respects to the many great patriots from Yamaguchi. I am from Fukuoka Prefecture. I am conservative. I hate anybody who is 'anti-Japanese'. Pleased to meet you.”
Japan’s internet right wingers, known as netto uyoku ネット右翼, or neto uyo ネトウヨ for short, are a loosely connected network of individuals on social media (especially Twitter) with a few key instigators. They toe a familiar ultranationalist line of xenophobic and discriminatory views. On social media they fill their bios with combinations of jingoistic and discriminatory phrases, from “I love Japan! 🎌 PATRIOTISM!” “Protect Japan! No communists!” and “Amend the Japanese Constitution!” to “I hate anti-Japanese countries!” (that is, China, South Korea, and North Korea) and “I despise the anti-Japanese trash mass media!” Some profile pictures and headers proudly feature the Japanese wartime flag, which they vehemently deny is a symbol of imperial oppression, or a particular photo of scowling Donald Trump, publicly performing their solidarity with his views. In the last several years, the language of “fake news” and rabid anti-leftist rhetoric has intensified across the globe. Since 2017, even QAnon has found a place in Japan, integrating easily into preexisting far right communities. Neto uyo is treated in the media and internet communities as a derogatory term, evoking an indignant denial of ultranationalist identity from those who are its most conspicuous embodiments.
The neto uyo’s reaction to the “Case for Retraction” and the New Yorker article showcased their routine tactics. They began repeatedly dropping links to far right blogs, news sites, and Youtube channels on our tweets and in the replies of others who expressed support for us, stating that we needed to study the “correct” materials to have the full story, a story which confirmed Ramseyer’s historical claims. The neto uyo alleged that foreign scholars were attacking the Japanese because they were Japanese, while conveniently ignoring war crimes committed by their own countries. A slew of ultranationalist comfort women truthers followed, with an army of logical fallacies and racist talking points that were equal parts anti-Korean outrage and nativist assertions that only they had the facts. “Do you discriminate against Japanese people?” one wrote, “If not, take a look at this,” linking to a right wing propaganda video by a well-known comfort women denier.
The Japanese right wing commonly use these all-or-nothing and whataboutist approaches in online harassment to paint overseas critics as anti-Japanese (hannichi 反日) and summarily dismiss their perspectives. Once several of us were on the radar of key leaders in the neto uyo Twitter community, who boast tens of thousands (and even hundreds of thousands) of followers, they took to visiting our accounts and leaving comments on any and every tweet they found, frequently revisiting old ones and retweeting them to ensure our offenses stayed in circulation. One of their favorite methods to incite commentary was to leave an image of a Korean knock-off Lego set depicting the assassination of Itō Hirobumi on our threads, asking “What do you think about this?” with the hopes that we would respond with condemnations of Korea or affirmations of our purported anti-Japanese leanings.
In the weeks that followed, those who became targets of these right wing circles experienced a wide variety of online harassment as the neto uyo dug through our online media profiles and professional pages (screencapping and sharing them), tweeted at our employers and funders calling us racists spreading hate speech, and gleefully declared that anyone who blocked them was no scholar, as we “ran away” instead of engaging in discussion. Some of us received hate mail, some of us death threats. The worst of the harassment was reserved for female researchers, whose credentials were relentlessly questioned, as well as native Japanese scholars, who received comments questioning their ethnicity. Those residing in Japan, where neto uyo felt their actions would be most effective, also endured particularly virulent attacks on their personal lives and places of employment.
Information about our backgrounds was quickly integrated into the conspiracy theories that motivate many neto uyo. One ringleader used past funding information — a Japan Foundation grant from 2015 — to incite her followers to attack me, claiming “This person is receiving a scholarship from the Japan Foundation. In other words, she’s doing Japanese research using Japanese taxes, and spreading hate of Japan all over the world. Let’s do something!” Some of the tweets promoted by the neto uyo leaders even claimed that Jews were secretly running the Japan Foundation. Others accused us of being funded by South Korea or China, and that we were secretly communists. Any attempts to actually engage using facts or reason were immediately met with deflections or purposeful misinterpretations. Many of us quickly learned the best methods to mass-block on Twitter.
Now some eight-months since the initiation of this harassment, many of us are still in circulation on their Twitter feeds, with our tweets being monitored from alternative accounts and posts misinterpreting our words being created on conspiracy blogs and forums. This form of relentless online provocation is so commonplace among digital extremist communities in Japan that it has even been given its own term: resuba レスバ, an abbreviated combination of the words “response” and “battle.” One who engages in a “response battle” is said to be making empty, meaningless replies over and over again in lieu of an actual argument. To combat the neto uyo insistence that overseas scholars were in fact harassing them, at the beginning of September 2021, I catalogued roughly six months of tweets from one particular ringleader’s account, finding that in some 200 days she had tweeted nearly 700 times at or about myself, Amy Stanley, and Sayaka Chatani. She continues to tweet about us today.
Academics and the Public Sphere
During these months of harassment, J. Mark Ramseyer hung over the online discourse around comfort women and the ownership of history like a specter, always there, but curiously absent in the flesh. For weeks after the criticisms and news media coverage circulated, he remained silent and made no formal or public statements on his work. Yet, the neto uyo vehemently defended every word of it. They tweeted and screencapped and churned out bilingual hashtags like #ProtectJohnMarkRamseyer / #ラムザイヤ教授を守れ and #ラムザイヤー教授の慰安婦論文は覆せない (Professor Ramseyer’s comfort women article cannot be overturned). They angrily complained that the “anti-Japanese scholars” were not providing evidence that Ramseyer was wrong, though they entirely refused to engage with the 36-page refutation or any other historical materials provided. In their eyes, Ramseyer had reached the status of savior and defender, a right wing champion whose Harvard credentials and Order of the Rising Sun award were beyond reproach.
Prof. J. Mark Ramseyer publicly accuses his critics. Source: https://youtu.be/sxmIkocBaY0.
Ramseyer finally appeared as part of a video conference on comfort women hosted in Tokyo during late April 2021, where he referred to his critics as Stalinists and accused the humanities in the United States of harboring anti-Japanese bias. His comments played directly into the right wing’s rejection of scholarship that does not affirm their views and served to fill a crucial gap that has prevented the historical denialist community from obtaining the legitimacy they seek within and outside Japan.
Around the same time that Ramseyer participated in this event, I guest lectured via Zoom in a colleague’s modern Japanese history class, recounting the Ramseyer affair from its beginnings to the online furor that has continued to haunt myself and my colleagues. “But why do you do it?” the students wanted to know when I told them that many of us still engaged with the worst (and sometimes, the most absurd) of our trolls. I told them that we felt a responsibility to stand our ground. Another student added, “But how could a Harvard professor do this?”
This question struck at the heart of what many online and elsewhere have been asking from the beginning: Why was this allowed to happen? Though there is no single, satisfying answer, for those with experience in academia this is not a question that needs to be asked. Time and time again we have seen that privilege, institutions, and networks of enablers allow certain people, (most often senior, white men at elite schools) to abuse their positions. These instances embody the “Ivory Tower” at its worst, the kind of academia that scholars have been struggling uphill to reform and decolonize. What or who needs protecting here? If anything, this incident has shown that the veneer of legitimacy afforded by privilege can have devastating effects, effects which cannot and should not be ignored.
The stakes of history may not always seem high when one thinks of the past as something distant that has no impact on today’s world — something that one learns about in textbooks, in the context of the classroom. In this sense, history does not necessarily feel “present.” But these pasts were once and are still a part of people’s lives. It is essential that historians and other academics communicate how and why academic misconduct has real world consequences. To step in, rather than stand by.
Does it matter that we hold public-facing history accountable for academic integrity? The neto uyo felt victorious and vindicated to see that a Harvard professor sided with their extremist views (however they chose to interpret them), and the validation of these beliefs can quickly translate into real world violence. Consider how plans to publicly discuss comfort women triggered threats to burn down the 2019 Aichi Triennale featuring Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung’s Statue of Peace. When some of the same works featured at the Triennale were exhibited in Osaka this summer, they were met with protests and a threatening package purporting to be the nerve agent sarin. We are beyond believing that what is written in the pages of academic journals — now more accessible than ever through online media — will not make it to a public audience, particularly when the authors are prepared to translate their studies into easily digestible pieces for news outlets.
Does it matter that we combat a false history of contracts legitimizing the sexual enslavement of women some 75 years ago? Consider the Nagoya man who was arrested this past June for forcing a 13-year old girl into signing a “slave contract” before raping her. We cannot know what motivated the perpetrator to take this step, but the rhyme of history echoes throughout this incident; all manner of atrocities have been done using a shield of legality. Ramseyer’s untruths about comfort women and contracts has an undeniable resonance with this incident, justifying the sexual enslavement of women and girls through the supposed validity of contracts while ignoring the question of free will and coercion.
Does it matter that academics hold peer reviewed venues and media venues alike accountable to experts for their content? Consider that on August 29, 2021, the extreme right wing LDP Diet Member Mio Sugita suggested in her official capacity that the diplomatic budget include the promotion of “correct histories” like that of J. Mark Ramseyer, while one of her colleagues stated that there should be an official way to monitor overseas activities that “defame” Japan. This recommendation was posted to her blog and tweeted to her 232,000 followers, gaining widespread visibility among neto uyo communities and, in their eyes, further legitimizing their position that any criticism of Japan (current or historical) amounts to anti-Japanese activities that must be surveilled and quashed. Although the scholars who refuted Ramseyer’s article did so on the basis of academic integrity, many ultraconservative netizens argue that they are denying Ramseyer’s right to academic freedom--an ironic stance in light of the suggestion that anti-Japanese activities be monitored and “correct histories” promoted by the Japanese government. Although the original 36-page refutation stands as a testament to the dedication of many scholars to academic integrity, almost a year later, IRLE has not retracted the paper.
Beyond the Tower
Despite vigorous challenges to liberal arts education in recent decades, social media has proven that these skills are more valuable than ever; critically evaluating sources of information, identifying bias among our detractors, and ethically employing history are far from irrelevant. Hundreds of analog and digital pages have been written as a result of Ramseyer’s eight-page article. The professional, mental, and emotional labor spent has been enormous. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus released two special issues of articles in response, one on comfort women and the other on Ramseyer’s recent burakumin studies. Even scholars outside the history field have been critical of Ramseyer's approaches for years, though it is only recently that his radicalization has become more visible; he has even gone so far as to openly admit that by focusing on Koreans, Burakumin, and Okinawans in his work, he can side-step criticisms so prevalent in “ethnic politics” within the American academy. Prominent scholars and organizations have now created study aids to put these issues in perspective in the classroom.
For what it’s worth, the Asian Studies field is more invigorated than ever to combat these injustices on and offline. Although in many ways social media has been a platform where history is corrupted, twisted, and misrepresented to odious ends, it has also generated new possibilities for solidarity among those who would step up to challenge the misuse of the past and refuse to let malignant untruths proliferate without accountability.
The Ivory Tower’s walls are beginning to crack — not merely because our academic institutions and freedoms have been and still are under serious threat, but because those who have abused their positions of influence by leveraging distinguished titles and elite affiliations are finding that virtual connections are quickly replacing barriers of privilege. For better or for worse, the age of social media has seen accountability arise at a speed and scale like never before. Academics have been told for decades that they must leave their towers and speak to the common person. That they must step up and be present, accessible, responsive, and relevant.
There are undoubtedly many ways that academics can fulfill that mission, but the demands that we be public, particularly on social media and in the popular press, continue to grow. And for all the benefits of closing the gap between the academic and public spheres, we must wrestle not only with the standards of academic integrity in our peer reviewed mediums but also with the dangers of how information is misused and weaponized in digital spaces. The effects of misinformation and disinformation can be far-reaching and immediate, when an eight-page article and a 1,500-word news blogpost can generate an international incident with global ramifications. Whether we like it or not, the fight for history is taking place on a digital battleground. Now, more than ever, it is imperative that we rise to meet our duty as public intellectuals, dispense with towers, and serve the public by countering outrageous narratives that do injustice to the past and to those who lived it. You asked for us. Here we are.
Paula R. Curtis, Ph.D. is Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in History at the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. A historian of premodern Japan, she researches artisanal organizations, social status, forgery, and elite institutions from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. She also engages in digital studies and writes regularly on online presence in academia. Her work has been supported by the Japan Foundation and the Fulbright Japan Program. You can find her on Twitter at @paularcurtis or visit her digital portfolio at prcurtis.com. This essay expands on ideas first published in the Tokyo Review.
To cite this Commentary essay, please use the suggested entry below:
Paula R. Curtis, “Taking the Fight for Japan's History Online,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, October 12, 2021; https://doi.org/10.52698/JUQE9153.