Commentary | Michael Wert, Historical Positivism, Ideology, and Nationalism in the Ramseyer Case
As is by now well known, in December of 2020, Mark Ramseyer, a professor in Harvard’s law school, published an online article for the journal International Review of Law and Economics, titled “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War.” He followed this with an online op-ed piece in January summarizing his views that the academic consensus about the coercive, involuntary, and often brutal “comfort women” system of sex slaves, maintained by the Japanese military across Asia during World War II, was completely wrong. The response by actual historians of East Asia, including those at Harvard, was swift. His Harvard law school colleague, Jeannie Suk Gersen, published an article for the New Yorker offering a useful summary of the comfort women’s history, the historical memory wars connected to them, and the many problems with Ramseyer’s article. Her’s was the most prominent rebuttal among law and economy scholars, who began a chorus of complaints about his use of contract theory.
Ramseyer’s supporters are not a surprise: mostly right-wing activists connected to various revisionist outlets such as the Sankei shimbun and Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact (a title where only the prepositions are innocent). Into February, the predictable thesis, antithesis, synthesis rhythm of these types of controversies continued as two scholars in South Korea appealed to “both sides” of Ramseyer’s article, touting academic freedom. The gist of their argument can be paraphrased, let empiricism, not emotions, settle this. As others have pointed out, this misrecognizes Ramseyer’s approach, which is about denial, not debate.
As the Ramseyer controversy unfolds we are left with questions of how and why? Why does someone, whom we assume should know better, completely deny the historical record of comfort women that has long been established? How did an article make it this far through the peer review process? Why has this become an issue now even though his views on comfort women have appeared before? How can a scholar can write, in all seriousness, that a child voluntarily entered into a contract; “the recruiter did not try to trick her; even at age 10, she knew what the job entailed.”
Under pressure, Ramseyer later admitted that he made a mistake about the girl, but he sticks by the overall argument that coercion, deceit, and outright trafficking of comfort-women is “pure fiction.” But, having misrepresented the historical sources, how could he have made such a “mistake” in the first place? Having written about the “pure fiction” of comfort women as slaves for several years, why did it take only a few weeks for historians to show how wrong he was in his (mis)use of evidence? As a Harvard professor, he had ample access to resources and experts, and surely, he must be intelligent.
As I followed the unfolding controversy, I was reminded of a 2015 symposium I participated in at Marquette University on the comfort women. We hosted Uemura Takashi, a journalist who covered former comfort women in a series of widely read articles in the early 1990s. He acted as the keynote speaker, while experts in law, ethics, Korean history, and a documentary creator also presented.
What I presented then, I think, still applies now. Namely, that questions of how and why cannot be answered through historical positivism because “correct use” of facts will not convince deniers that they are wrong. Using evidence and facts will not convince comfort women deniers, in much the same way that one cannot logically argue with climate change deniers, Holocaust deniers, and the like – we could now add QAnon and “stop-the-steal” believers. No, a response cannot occur at the level of positivism (presenting more evidence) alone. We must also ask what underlying assumptions and conditions exist that allow historical denial to flourish. And pursuing this question means investigating thought and ideology. In other words, if the historical reality about the comfort women as sex slaves has already been established, regardless of whatever debates might exist within the historical memory, why believe otherwise?
For nationalists in Japan, comfort women highlight the antagonisms inherent to conservative and nationalist ideology. I do not mean ideology in the colloquial sense of a conscious political worldview, but as the unacknowledged ideological subject that has become “common sense.” The “unknown knowns” as Slavoj Zizek describes it, borrowing Donald Rumsfeld’s formula. And within ideology in this usage, there is often a fantasy element that fills in the gap inherent in totalizing ideologies. Fantasy does not oppose reality but supports it, explaining why ideology can never be fully realized. In other words, as Zizek puts it, fantasy takes into account ideology’s failure in advance.[1]
In a nationalist vision of Japan, all parts of society are supposed to fit into a harmonious organic whole: all working together to push Japan forward. Of course, this nationalist ideology does not, cannot, ever work – there are always tensions due to, at the very least, economic difference.
Comfort women, then, become a fantasy for conservatives. The figure of the comfort woman explains why, since the 1990s, the conservative dream of a homogeneous, middle class, guiltless Japan, cannot exist. Since the Japanese state is at the center of this dream, a system of coercion against foreign women organized by the state is deemed particularly offensive. Thus, for conservatives and nationalists, comfort women represent a foreign intrusion that prevents Japan from functioning as a smooth, middle-class society. If only the “truth” of the comfort women (or the Nanjing massacre) could be fully resolved, Japan could wipe away wartime guilt and Japanese could realize their patriotism.
“For conservatives and nationalists, comfort women represent a foreign intrusion that prevents Japan from functioning as a smooth, middle-class society.”
Ramseyer’s career, far from being a contrarian or dissenter, is more accurately described as Japanese nationalist warrior. His publications demonstrate a consistent ideological theme, relying on the truth claims of law and economics to attack anything that makes Japan seem inherently bad. These include belittling the domestic other (attacks on burakumin); questioning the foreign threat within (Koreans in Japan, denying massacre of Koreans after the 1923 Tokyo earthquake); and dismissing anything that smacks of the “left” (the keiretsu as fable, Japanese university departments mired in “Marxist” scholars, failed social welfare programs, etc). He truly deserved the Order of the Rising Sun!
In her New Yorker article, Jeannie Suk Gersen noted “how straightforward and yet how mystifying [his work] proved to be.” If we accept that much of his life’s mystifying scholarship has been consistent, in its content, as ideologically informed, then it should not be surprising that the form of his scholarship too has been consistent. He often uses terms like “pure fiction” and “fable,” such as the keiretsu as “fable” created by “Marxists, or the “fable” surrounding land reform in occupied Japan. The sentences in many of his abstracts and introductions are short; scholars say X, but they’re wrong. Such-and-such is not at all true. Economics, as science, is “truth,” and nothing else can be true.
I imagine that quick reaction by so many economics scholars is not because of his misuse of contract theory, which has been the focus of their criticism, but that Ramseyer’s argument is too uncomfortably close to the logical endpoint of contract theory and rational choice theory (for which he was once lauded): that humans, inherently, seek to optimize all their life choices, including buying and selling of our labor, freely entering into fair contracts with each other. Economics professors rightly point out that in colonialism there are no honest choices because of imperialism’s coercive nature. But the so-called normal function of modern capitalism similarly presents us with limited choices, a limitation that is hidden by the assumption, the “facts,” that rational choice is just the way human nature works.
Why the reaction now? I think that people are pretty angry at the influence conspiracy thinking has had during the 2020 election, led by Giuliani, Trump, and QAnon – that the “facts” showed that the election was stolen. Like comfort women denial, right wing ideology at the end of 2020 unfortunately had concrete effects: attempts to deny an election, the capital insurrection, and now anti-voter laws in Georgia. That Harvard professors were among the first to respond to Ramseyer might similarly spring from the fact that this does not make them look good either – his comfort woman denial is recent, but not new, and is entirely consistent with some of his pseudo-historical publications.
How did his article ever see the light of day? It could be that many of his ideological publications are in either economic or law journals which no one who teaches Asia would read, and those who do read them are not really in a position to judge the accuracy of content nor are in a position to influence students on how to think about Koreans, burakumin, and comfort women. Those publications are a mix of some metanarrative, some legal or economic framework, and polemics. In other words, sneaking bad history into non-historical journals. For Ramseyer, “facts” tell us all we need to know and it is likely that peer reviewers didn’t have the ability to judge the content. That’s a best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that peer reviewers were in a position to judge and somehow dropped the ball. My worry is that the latter case is true, especially after Ramseyer presented Jeannie Suk Gersen with letters of support from two senior scholars who work on Japan, Mary Elizabeth Berry (“Ramseyer’s research is formidable, exacting, and carefully marshaled”) and David Weinstein (“It is important for academic journals to sometimes publish controversial, fact-based pieces and let readers decide for themselves which arguments are persuasive”). Both, it should be noted, quickly backtracked when presented with the obvious problems with the Ramseyer article. But we can only hope that they never read his article in the first place because if they had, and missed what even a non-expert could see was wrong with the form of his article, it doesn’t bode well for recent worries about the death of “Japan studies.” One minor solution is to read more outside of Asian studies into theory, or simply “thought” if that sounds better. Analysis of “facts” alone is not enough; we need the much more difficult ability to engage in critical inquiry that exposes unstated assumptions in scholarship.
What should happen to Ramseyer? Calls for his firing won’t go anywhere, nor should they. Firing or censuring him only allows people to feel good without dealing with a much larger problem. He is a symptom, not the disease. And the death threats he has received after the South Korean press reported about this article are indeed horrible; you can’t counter right-wing reactionary nationalism with more right-wing reactionary nationalism from somewhere else. I hope what will happen is akin to an academic madogiwazoku, a term that began during the Japanese economic bubble. Literally “the window tribe,” it was used to refer to senior people who you can’t get rid of but who shouldn’t have influence anymore. His burakumin work seems to be under scrutiny now as does his writing on Koreans during the 1923 massacre. To reiterate the problem, the co-editor of a volume in which his chapter on the Korean massacre was to appear stated, “We assumed that Professor Ramseyer knows the history better than us.” The jig is up for Ramseyer, but his case is a warning in our teaching of undergraduates, training of graduate students, hiring practices, and peer review hand-waving, especially by senior scholars at first-tier institutions.
Notes:
[1] Sublime Object of Ideology, p 142.
Dr. Michael Wert is an associate professor of East Asian history at Marquette University with a focus on early modern and modern Japan.
To cite this essay, please use the suggested entry below:
Michael Wert, “Historical Positivism, Ideology, and Nationalism in the Ramseyer Case,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, March 29, 2021; https://doi.org/10.52698/PGUX7576.