Editorial Note: This is a summary introduction to a longer essay Prof. Morris-Suzuki wrote in rebuttal to Harvard’s Mark Ramseyer. She has embedded hyperlinks to her original essay.
The international order, globally and in East Asia, is in the midst of a profound and unpredictable transformation. Worldwide, economic instability is increasing and the gulf between rich and poor is deepening. In this context, and in the context of the rapid evolution of online media, waves of nationalism and xenophobia are amplifying around the world. Japan is no exception to this trend, as evident from the rhetoric surrounding the advent of the new Japanese Prime Minister, Takaichi Sanae, who is known for her sometimes inflammatory statements about foreigners in Japan. This wave of jingoism has a long back-story. For thirty years, far right nationalist groups – some with links to fringe religions and/or influential business circles – have been pushing agendas which include historical denialism of some key events of the Asia Pacific War and hostile rhetoric towards foreign or minority groups in Japan.
A more recent participant in these inflamed wars of words is Harvard professor of law and economics J. Mark Ramseyer, whose work until 2019 had focused on the Japanese legal system and corporate law. In the past five or more years, he has become closely engaged with members of Japanese far-right study groups, and has focused much of his energy on championing their views: particularly on disseminating negative stereotypes of minority and vulnerable communities. These communities include the former ‘Comfort Women’, Koreans in Japan [Zainichi Koreans], members of the Hisabetsu Buraku community, Okinawans and most recently Ainu and indigenous minorities more generally. (The links provided here provide brief outlines of the background of each group).
Ramseyer’s approach to these issues typically involves writing papers which begin with a ‘theoretical’ discussion, drawing on an eclectic mix of economic and other theories. This provides an entry into ‘case studies’ of particular minorities or other marginalised social groups: case studies that repeatedly cherry-pick or misquote source material to produce sweeping and demeaning depictions of the target group. The many hundreds of thousands of Koreans in Japan, for example, are dismissed en masse as a ‘dysfunctional’ community with low social capital, high welfare dependence, low education levels and high crime rates: a group hijacked by ‘opportunistic fringe-left entrepreneurs’, who create ‘enormous ethnic tension within Japan’. ‘Comfort women’, we are told, were simply paid prostitutes. Members of the Buraku social minority are re-defined (in contradiction to the existing scholarly literature) as the descendants of ‘a loose collection of unusually self-destructive poor farmers’ with ‘dysfunctional norms’, who have brought social exclusion on themselves by ‘their involvement in crime and their disintegrating family structures’. Okinawan society, too, is ’dysfunctional’ (Ramseyer’s favourite epithet), with families ‘close to collapse’ and people collecting money from the government through ‘nuisance claims’. Most recently, Ainu are described (along with other indigenous societies) as having been people who ‘relentlessly fight each other over resources and women’. After failing to adjust to modernity, Ramseyer tells us, the Ainu have simply ‘disappeared’ from Japan.
I invite readers to imagine the reaction of academic journals if the targets of these articles, described with the same terminology, had been African Americans, Indigenous Americans or other US minority groups. Ramseyer, however, succeeded in having his articles on the ‘comfort women’, Hisabetsu Buraku and Koreans in Japan published in specialised journals in the field of law and economics, where they appear to have been peer reviewed by people without expertise in the relevant field of Japanese social history. Ramseyer’s Ainu paper has been uploaded on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), but has not yet been published any peer reviewed journal – it is unclear whether it has been submitted to one. It may be best to wait until a peer reviewed version appears before downloading, reading and seeking to critique it.
It is worth noting that Ramseyer offers no evidence of having attempted to engage with any members of the groups whom he targets. Why a professor from a prestigious academic institution should choose to spend the final years of his career launching such verbal attacks on groups with whom he seems to have no meaningful connection may always remain a mystery. But the Ramseyer case also raises much wider issues of integrity in scholarly publishing: issues which become increasingly important in an age of declining funding for higher education, the massive online circulation of ‘fake news’, and impassioned and often confused debates over hate speech in a world of free speech.
Articles like Ramseyer’s create a profound dilemma for scholars who have devoted years of their life to studying the histories of the groups whom the Harvard professor targets. Will an effort to expose the many flaws in his writings simply draw more attention to the negative stereotypes that he recycles, thus giving them greater traction? Will ignoring his papers allow misleading information to amplify unchecked? How can we counter the vicious cycle of inter-communal hostility that negative stereotyping provokes? How can we bring academic debate back to the realm of evidence-based research and respect for conflicting opinions, when faced with work riddled with factual errors and couched in pejorative language?
When Ramseyer’s ‘comfort women’ article appeared, many scholars in Japan, the US and elsewhere devoted great time and effort to highlighting its mass of historical inaccuracies. Some also sought a retraction from International Review of Law and Economics, which published the article. The journal conducted a two-year review, published two rebuttal articles, and chose to retain a statement of concern about possible inaccuracies the article’s content; but the editors did not withdraw the article, stating that they were unable to find evidence of ‘clear data fabrication or falsification’ by the author. A number of leading scholars on the history of the Hisabetsu Buraku community contacted the Review of Law and Economics, which had published one of Ramseyer’s articles on this subject, asking the journal to retract the article, but without success. It is worth noting, though, that other publishers have taken a different approach. Cambridge University Press, for example, decided to publish a chapter by Ramseyer on the privatization of the Japanese police in its Cambridge Handbook of Privatization only after all the (highly problematic) material on minority groups originally contained in the text had been removed.
The response of the European Journal of Law and Economics to criticisms of Ramseyer’s article on Koreans in Japan is discussed in detail in my paper ‘Koreans in Japan and Ethics in Scholarly Publishing: A response to Professor J. Mark Ramseyer’, now available on SSRN. As I explain in this paper, I originally wrote this in 2021 as a rebuttal article which I submitted to the journal, but I later withdrew it from publication for reasons explained in this (somewhat updated) SSRN version. Ramseyer’s article on Zainichi Koreans remains in print in the journal with only a very small portion of its mistakes corrected by a subsequent erratum.
My reason for making an updated version of my rebuttal article publicly available now is that, unchecked (or encouraged?) by previous experience, Ramseyer continues to publish papers on minority issues replicating all the flaws pointed out by careful scholarly critiques of his earlier articles. Like others, I am deeply concerned that his work, as well as being full of factual inaccuracies, may be aggravating the prejudice and hostility experienced by minorities and marginalised groups in Japan.
Writing critiques of Ramseyer’s ‘comfort women’, Zainichi Korean and Hisabetsu Buraku articles is a time-consuming process which takes scholars away from other important (and much more enjoyable) work. It involves spending many hours tracking down often obscure documents which have been cherry-picked or misquoted. It is, as I have also discovered, an emotionally draining and exhausting process. For those who care about this history and engage with the social groups involved, it is profoundly distressing to repeatedly read demeaning and ill-informed verbal abuse which many of us had hoped were disappearing from public discourse. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is supposed to be an international body dedicated to debating and advancing publication ethics, but appeals to COPE to provide guidance on Ramseyer’s ‘comfort women’ and Zainichi Korean articles resulted in their essentially leaving the judgment to the discretion of individual journal editors. A request to COPE to look at the Ramseyer case as a whole produced no response.
As I argue in my SSRN paper, it is now crucially important for those concerned with academic ethics and those engaged in scholarly publishing to take a much more serious look at the problems illustrated by the Ramseyer case – problems which are likely to become all the more severe as nationalist tensions and conflicts rise, and as fake news proliferates further in East Asia and worldwide. The large publishing corporations who own and profit from most peer reviewed journals have a moral responsibility to address this issue; so too does COPE. In a world of free speech, there must be room for widely varying views on contentious histories, including the histories of marginalised communities. But there should be no room for repeated misquotation and skewing of source material, nor for the propagation of offensive ethnic stereotypes and the litany of other problems that I outline in my paper ‘Koreans in Japan and Ethics in Scholarly Publishing’.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor Emerita, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University