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How the U.S. suppressed Harvard's "comfort women's history-distorting riot"
3·1절은 대한민국 역사에서 중요한 국경일로 꼽힌다. 대한민국의 헌법 전문 초입에 “유구한 역사와 전통에 빛나는 우리 대한민국은 3·1운동으로 건립된 대한민국임시정부의 법통”을 명시한 대목만 봐도 일제식민통치 시절 자주독립을 선포한 3.1절의 위상을 가늠할 수 있다.
하지만 해방 이후 반세기가 넘게 흘렀지만 여전히 일본과의 관계는 과거사 문제로 갈등을 겪는 경우가 많다. 최근 불거진 램지어 하버드 대학 로스쿨 교수의 ‘위안부 역사 왜곡’은 일본이 자신들의 식민통치 시절 반인륜적인 행태를 어떤 식으로 합리화하려는 지 보여주는 사례이다.
필자인 김수형 SBS 워싱턴 특파원은 램지어 교수의 위안부 역사 왜곡 문제를 미국 현지에서 밀착 취재하며 진실을 파헤쳤다. 결국 램지어 교수의 주장은 학자로서의 기본도 되지 않았던 허위로 드러났다. 이 과정에서 오히려 국내 극우세력은 램지어 교수의 주장에 동조하는 행태를 보였다. 민족의 독립을 위해 일제의 총칼 앞에서도 분연히 일어났던 선조들의 저항과 결기로 대한민국은 여기까지 왔다. 102주년 3.1절을 맞아 김수형 특파원의 칼럼이 주는 시사점은 그래서 특별하다.[편집자]
#램지어 교수 위안부 논문 美서 파장
“학문적 부정행위, 논문 철회하라”
#글로벌 검증단, 2주 밤낮 팩트체크
계약서·진술 실체 없었다는 것 밝혀
#’매춘 계약’ 포장에 경제학계도 분노
“강압과 착취 관계 은폐 위해 남용”
#학문적 폭동에는 학문으로 제압
‘닥치고 반일’보다 논리로 대응해야
‘태평양 전쟁에서 매춘 계약’이라는 도발적인 제목을 담은 존 마크 램지어(John Mark Ramseyer, 67세) 미국 하버드대 로스쿨 교수의 논문은 미국 사회에서 적지 않은 파장을 일으켰다. 법과 경제학적 관점에서 위안부의 계약 관계를 분석했다는 외피를 입기는 했지만, 위안부 피해자들을 자발적 매춘부로 결론 내린 것은 미국 학계의 기존 입장과 정면 배치되는 것이었다. 일본 극우 세력의 시각을 미국 주류 학계에 진입시키려는 시도로, 일종의 ‘위안부 역사왜곡 폭동 사태’로도 규정할 수 있다. 실행 주체가 미국 최고 대학의 교수라는 점에서 한국 사회의 관심도 집중됐고, 전범 기업인 미쓰비시의 후원으로 자리가 생긴 석좌 교수라는 사실이 알려지자 ‘닥치고 반일’의 감정이 이번 사건을 또 뒤덮는 듯 했다. 하지만 미국에서 벌어진 사건인 만큼 한국 사회의 감정 논리가 사건 전개에 크게 개입될 여지없이, 미국 사회가 이번 사태를 어떻게 정리하는지 객관적으로 관찰할 수 있는 드문 기회를 제공했다.
“계약서도 진술도 실체가 없다”…근원 타격한 하버드 교수들의 반박
하버드 대학에서 동아시아 역사를 가르치고 있는 앤드루 고든, 카터 에커트 교수는 연구 진실성 보고서에 가까운 반박문을 발표했다. 이들은 위안부가 자발적 매춘부가 아니라는 역사적인 공방을 준비하기 보다는 램지어 교수 논문의 근원을 바로 타격하는 영리한 전략을 택했다. 논문의 출처를 하나하나 따지며 사실 관계와 출처를 추적하기 시작했는데, 두 교수는 검증 시작부터 학문의 진실성이라는 우선적인 문제와 직면하게 됐다고 발표했다.
램지어 교수는 위안부 피해자들이 자발적인 매춘부라고 주장하면서 논문에 계약서의 존재에 대해서 여러 차례 언급했지만 두 교수가 논문을 샅샅이 뒤져보니 그가 위안부와 위안소 운영자 사이 맺었다는 계약서의 실체를 한 개도 확인하지 않았다고 결론 내렸다. 논문에 나오는 계약서 문건 가운데 하나는 상하이 위안소에서 일하는 위안부가 아니라 바텐더의 표준 계약서였다고 확인했다. 하버드 역사학과 교수들은 어떻게 실물을 보지도 않고 램지어는 그렇게 극단적으로 강한 어조로 위안부가 계약 매춘부라는 주장을 할 수 있었는지 납득이 안 갔다고 기술했다.
램지어 교수가 실체가 있다고 주장하는 계약서에 대한 3자의 구두, 서면 진술이라도 있어야 하겠지만, 이마저도 전무했다. 미얀마의 한국인 위안부 계약서라고 주장한 것은 전쟁 이전 것이었고, 그나마도 샘플에 불과했다고 두 교수는 적시했다. 딱 한 가지 검증할 수 있는 3자의 진술이 미얀마와 싱가포르에서 위안소 관리인의 일기였는데, 이것도 일기 자체가 아니라 일기에 대해 언급한 문건이었던 것으로 확인됐다.
이러한 태도는 학술 논문의 진실성에 대한 지독한(egregious) 위반이라고 비난하면서 다른 학자들이 추가로 논문의 오류에 대한 기록을 정리하고 있다는 예고까지 덧붙였다. 두 교수는 학술지가 이 논문에 대한 전문가 조사 결과를 기다려 게재를 철회해야 한다고 요구했다. 역사학 교수들과 램지어 교수의 공방을 기대했지만 뜻밖에 본 게임이 열리지도 못하고 램지어 교수 논문은 이렇게 큰 결함이 발견됐다.
두 교수의 반박문은 절제된 언어로 팩트의 약한 고리를 정확히 찌르고 있었고, 그것이 상대를 무엇보다 고통스럽게 만든다는 것을 잘 알고 있는 듯 했다. 석장밖에 안 되는 반박문은 한번만 읽어보면 램지어 논문의 가장 큰 문제가 무엇인지 명확하게 이해할 수 있게 만들어졌다.
In the end, Professor Ramsey's arguments turned out to be false, which was not even the basis for his academic career. Rather, in this process, the domestic far-rights showed a behavior in accord with Professor Ramsey's argument. Korea came to this point with the resistance and determination of our ancestors that took place in front of the Japanese colonial sword for the independence of the nation.
Global Alliance's “Ramzier fact Check” made for two weeks day and night
The refutation report published by five foreign researchers studying Japanese history revealed the substance of Professor Ramsey's comfort women thesis more clearly to the academic world. From the title, it was set as <An event requiring the withdrawal of the thesis due to academic misconduct>, and it was clear what their purpose was. This document was written by Professor Stanley of Northwestern University in the U.S., Professor Ambras of North Carolina State University, Shepard Researcher at Cambridge University in England, Professor Chatani at the University of Singapore, and Professor Cedar at Gakuin University Aoyama in Japan. They created a global verification team and made a voluntary report. Professor Chatani wrote on Twitter, "I made a verification report literally day and night for the past two weeks, and I am proud to be a member of this." It was a fact-checking work that crosses borders, but most of the participating professors already had the experience of writing related books, so they were able to produce a seamless result within two weeks.
This verification report identifies four major themes (▲ the problem of not admitting that there is no evidence ▲ the problem of the use of direct evidence ▲ the problem of the use of indirect evidence ▲ the problem of inappropriate and inaccurate citations) and the appropriateness of each specific case and citation situation. I tracked it down and down. It would be difficult for professors who majored in to find the exact meaning of all the cited documents and books. The reality of the distortions of the late Ok-ju Moon's grandmother, which they confirmed, clearly reveals the reality of this report.
Professor Ramzier described the comfort women victim Ok-ju Moon in his thesis as a person who signed a prostitution contract with the operator of a comfort station, earning a lot of money and saving quite a bit. The source of this paper is expressed as (KIH, 2016b). However, when the thesis verification team followed this, it was confirmed that this was not an official publication, but was just an English translation floating on domestic internet blogs.
When I followed the actual link, this blog was a domestic ghost site where a collection of articles degrading comfort women victims by a far right-minded person. The name Korea Institute of History was floating on the website, but there was no administrator picture on the introduction page, and all there was an e-mail. I sent an email to this email address asking if the blog was actually running, but I didn't get an answer. After posting 39 articles in 2016, it was nothing more than a ‘Hungry Blog’ that was abandoned without activity.
Posts had a lot of external links, and many were linked to Internet bulletin boards such as DC Inside as well as the far-right daily best site known as ‘Ilbe’. The contents were all denying the reality of the victims of comfort women. It was difficult to think that Professor Harvard would cite such an unknown blog as a basis in his thesis, but that's what happened.
The bigger problem is that Professor Ramsey made a so-called "devil edit" that edits even this ghost blog post to your liking. Even on the unconfirmed blog, “I had more freedom in Yangon than before. Of course, you are not completely free. I was able to go out only once or twice a month with the permission of a Korean comfort station manager.” A ghost blog also expressed that Ok-joo Moon was in a state of being bound by physical freedom.
However, Professor Ramsey skipped this sentence and the sentence that follows, “I enjoyed going shopping in a rickshaw. I started the paragraph with the expression "I can't forget the experience of shopping in the Yangon market." She made a malicious edit to make her look like a professional prostitute who earns money and travels through Yangon, Myanmar, and spends money outright. Prof. Ramzier expressed his grandmother Moon Ok-ju, saying in his thesis, “Moon Ok-ju seemed to have lived the best among Korean comfort women who have a record. That's how I wrote it in my memoirs.”
The global verification team went through the books of Morikawa Machiko, who actually interviewed Ok-ju Moon, and described the whole context. The report began with the terrible thing that Grandma Moon suffered from being caught at a comfort station in Manchuria in 1940. After being taken to Manchuria from Daegu at the age of 16, Moon recollected that she cried all day long when she learned that she had to deal with 20,30 Japanese soldiers a day. With the help of a Japanese military policeman, she managed to escape, but in 1942, Ok-ja Moon was forced to go to Myanmar to go to a military cafeteria abroad to go to the housekeeper. Korean girls who had gathered at the port had to drop off one after another in Taiwan, Saigon, Singapore, and Yangon. Grandmother Moon recalled that she did not even know she was going to Myanmar and went there. Some Korean-speaking soldiers came and said, “I came here because you were deceived. I learned the truth after hearing the words "You are going to be a comfort woman."
The comfort station officials encouraged them to work hard because they would get tickets when they deal with soldiers, and they could exchange those tickets for money when they go to Korea. However, this was just a twist rather than a price for labor. There was nowhere evidence that Moon's grandmother received money for signing a prostitution contract, and scholars calmly pointed out that there was no evidence of such a ticket in Manchuria. Moon's actual memoirs explained that a series of processes pointed to coercion and deception.
Not only the ghost blog, but even Professor Ramsey wrote in the thesis that the grandmother Moon saved a lot of money as a tip. It means that the money was not collected from the money given by the comfort station, but the money that the soldiers gave individually. Grandmother Moon, who has a lively and active personality, seems to have thought of wickedly collecting money to escape Hell's Cave. However, the money deposited at the Shimonoseki Post Office ended up being denied payment by the San Francisco Treaty saying that Grandma Moon was no longer Japanese and could not be returned.
Eventually, the grandmother Moon died in 1996, without holding a dime in her hand. In an interview with Mr. Morikawa to inform the history of the tragic war, Professor Ramzier completely distorted the victim's history in order to fit his formula as a comfort woman as a prostitute. Professor Amy Stanley of Northwestern University said, "I hope that the International Legal and Economic Review in which the thesis is published will refer to our report and withdraw the thesis." Although they majored in Japanese history, they did not stand on either side and pursued the truth as the historical facts they studied. For them, the problem of comfort women victims was not a problem with Japan and Korea at all.
"A 10-year-old girl is also a prostitute."
Even economists, who had the greatest influence on the international legal and economic review of the academic journal where Professor Ramsey's thesis is published, struck a mass opposition. Prof. Ramzier's dissertation was rebutted and disapproved. As of the 28th, nearly 2,500 people signed. The massive backlash of these scholars in the United States is a big event that is hard to find. They started with the issue of Osaki, a 10-year-old Japanese girl in Professor Ramsey's thesis. Professor Ramsey presupposed that "Osaki was not coerced by his parents, nor was he a sex slave." When he received an offer from a prostitute recruitment plan that would give him 300 yen if he went abroad to work, he wrote, "I was ten years old, but I knew what was going on." However, without much ground, the recruiter described it as a good person, saying, "I did not try to trick her." It was explained that going to Malaysia was better than having Osaki as an abandoned child at home. The thesis states that Osaki actually started working as a prostitute for his family at the age of 13.
Economists angered, "Professor Ramsay is insisting that a 10-year-old can agree to become a sex worker." Game theory was applied to explain women who endured such a barbaric situation, and Ramsey explained that his thesis left a stigma not only for academic journals but also for economics practitioners.
Economists have expressed their greatest anger at trying to wrap up a prostitution contract with no evidence and wrap it up in economics. In Professor Ramsey's thesis, it was premised that there was no relevant fact other than that there were pimps with licenses in Japan. Based on this, he criticized for forcefully expanding and applying the logic that it is the same for comfort stations without any proper explanation. Economists also pointed out that the term contract itself has been abused in human history to conceal relations of coercion and exploitation. Professor Ramsey wrote that women, including girls, "agreeed" to the contractual relationship of becoming prostitutes without much explanation, but since 1896, Japan has made it impossible for people under the age of 20 to sign contracts on their own. I emphasized it until I checked it.
Ramsay's claim that a Japanese girl only ten years old had a prostitution contract, and that Joseon girls were voluntary prostitutes all had one purpose. Originally, prostitutes existed from the beginning of human history, and they voluntarily signed contracts to obtain maximum profits according to the game theory, so coercion cannot exist in the first place. Professor Ramzier also revealed in his thesis that it was blatantly explicit that it was neither the Japanese imperial nor the Joseon's responsibility. The blame was turned to the outside as the blame lies in the recruitment of prostitutes in Joseon. All conclusions were directed that there was no Japanese coercion. Economics was mobilized in this series of processes, and scholars were feeling deeply desperate.
Republic of Korea… How should we deal with this problem
On the one hand, it was fortunate that this issue took place in the United States. This is because a number of problems in the logic were exposed as a person who met the box office requirements of a Harvard University professor brought the logic of the Japanese far-right as it was and tried to write it in a dissertation, and academia all over the world raised their objections.
In particular, Professor Seok Ji-young of Harvard Law School put an end to the controversy by revealing through a direct interview with Professor Ramsey in an article that he contributed to the magazine New Yorker that Professor Ramsey had not presented a contract to prove the prostitution relationship as well as other indirect evidence.
The painful history of the victims of comfort women is not a target of battle, but a fact that has already been confirmed historically, and is an immovable fact. Interesting scholars and scholars from various countries have stepped forward and confirmed as their own work. Even if Korean far-right actors distort evidence to suit their tastes and argue that "there was no forced mobilization of Japanese imperialism, comfort women are prostitutes," it has set a good precedent for how to respond to them.
Even the origins of the claims of domestic far-rights, who remarkably resemble Ramsay's claims, are inevitably shaken by this incident. The source of the documents they claim is bound to be suspicious, and the statements are bound to be questioned whether or not they are twisted at will. This incident clearly shows how angry international academics are at the impure attempts to overthrow the history of the exploitation of human rights by the victims of comfort women.
What is regrettable is that our academic community should have brought out a refutation with the most elaborate data and examples on this historical distortion attempt, while scholars refuted the case and rolled the matter further, referring to what the professors who had previously made it. However, few of the relevant references were made by domestic research institutes or faculty members. Because the professorship itself was created with the support of a Japanese company, I don't even need to read Ramsay's thesis, but I wonder if he didn't really care about the problematic content of the thesis because he was overly excited and angry.
In fact, it is a normal situation for American universities to sponsor and donate companies so that Harvard University itself was named after a pastor who donated a large sum of money. In particular, in humanities, where money is not available, there are many schools that cannot maintain professor positions without corporate sponsorship. Nevertheless, academic freedom is a top priority in the United States, and scholars are free to study regardless of the will of such sponsoring companies. As seen in this situation, it has also been confirmed that such academic riots can be sufficiently suppressed by learning.
However, it is impossible for us, as parties, to completely exclude emotions. Looking at such an incident, the feelings of anger and loss that our people have are in some way natural. Nevertheless, I think that political use or emotional response to the case is of no use in resolving the situation. The same goes for politicians who convert anti-Japanese sentiment into votes, and some far-rights who are trying to get the attention by side of the crazily Japanese side, all pursuing political interests.
In particular, the purpose of stimulating public sentiment by some far-right forces unconditionally agreeing to Japan's perspective may be to make the case itself an emotional mess rather than revealing the reality of the comfort women problem. Prof. Ramsey's situation suggests to our society that it is possible to respond sufficiently with logic instead of anger to attempts to distort history, including the comfort women victims issue.
Kim Soo-hyung Writer
Correspondent for SBS Washington. He goes directly to various problematic sites in the United States and produces broadcast reports, as well as continuously leaving reviews on Facebook. He has been in charge of political parties and IT for a long time.