Academic freedom is not just an academic issue. When academics find that their freedom to pursue lines of inquiry and discuss their work in public is, sadly, often trampled upon by their colleagues, the damage reaches far beyond the ivory tower. may extend beyond.
Over the past decade, both of us have been subject to “cancellations” from the academy for opposing seemingly arcane footnotes on World War II. We argue, based on documentary evidence, legal structures, and economic logic, that most of the women who worked in Japanese military brothels were actually prostitutes.
Most (but not all) of the academics who have tried to stop us from speaking out on the comfort women issue do not realize that they are protecting North Korea.
North American journalists and professors instead claim that the women were dragged into sexual slavery. When Jason Morgan spoke out about the issue, his advisors made sure he didn’t get a job. When Mark Ramseyer published an eight-page paper on the subject in a remote academic journal, he faced years of attacks, including death threats and stalking from his South Korean reporting team.
The attacks were not instigated by fringe groups but by tenured professors at major universities. Amy Stanley of Northwestern University, Alexis Dudden of the University of Connecticut, Jeannie Suk Gersen of Harvard Law School, Andrew Gordon of Harvard University, Michael Chu of UCLA, and others published the Ramseyer paper in the same journal. He was among dozens of academics who called for the retraction of the . Some of them also demanded that they lose their teaching jobs.
If the cancellation had ended with a plodding apology, like many cancellations do, we wouldn’t be writing this today. However, instead, we studied the comfort women issue more intensely. Conscientious Korean scholars such as Lu Seok-chun (formerly of Yonsei University), Park Yoo-ha (Sejong University), and Lee Yong-hoon (formerly of Seoul National University) have advocated for “imposing a prison sentence for telling the truth.” Even when he was threatened, he did not back down. The truth about comfort women.
Neither could we.
Ultimately, it turns out that the conflict in its current form stems not from World War II, but from North Korea.
Seiji Yoshida, a Japanese communist and former prisoner, created the story in his 1983 putative memoir, and the Japanese newspaper Asahi brought it to great international attention. Historians quickly concluded that the story was false, and Yoshida eventually admitted that he had made it all up. In 2014, Asahi finally retracted all articles based on the Yoshida hoax. But all the while, South Korea’s North Korean allies seized control of the “sex slave” narrative and played it out with all their might for 30 years.
What we thought was a footnote to history was a ploy by North Korea to turn South Koreans against Japan and undermine efforts by Japan, South Korea, and the United States to deter North Korea.
Some of the most outlandish comfort women “testimonies” were actually fabricated by North Korea. The 1996 UN report on comfort women (which our attackers cite as evidence) incorporated one of North Korea’s “testimonies” without question, anyway.
Until recently, South Korean lawmaker Yoon Mi-hyang led an organization known as the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery. Mr. Yun also managed a virtual POW camp, “House of Sharing,” where former comfort women, many of them impoverished women, lived, and in exchange he ceded control of the former comfort women’s stories to Mr. Yun. . In 2023, the Seoul District Court found Yoon guilty of embezzling donations to comfort women into a personal account.
But it’s not just her account. Mr. Yoon also used the funds to fund pro-North Korean organizations. Her husband served time in prison for passing documents to a North Korean spy. The court also sentenced his sister to prison for her role in the incident. His sister’s husband served time in prison for his role in yet another North Korean spying case.
The council itself had its origins in a secret meeting on a ship in Nagasaki harbor between members of the Japanese Socialist Party and South Korean church leaders who wanted to begin cooperation with North Korea. They held their first symposium in Tokyo in 1991, which was attended by prominent North Korean leaders. They held a symposium in Pyongyang in 1992. This conference grew into the Korea Council.
The Chongtai Conference elite also includes former leaders of the United Progressive Party. The Constitutional Court banned the party in 2014 after police arrested party leaders who had plotted to support North Korea’s invasion.
When more than a dozen women from elite North Korean families defected to South Korea in 2016, Ms. Yoon and her husband, a North Korean spy, met with them multiple times at the South Korean National Assembly. They urged the women to return to North Korea. They paid the women’s leaders cash from Chong Taihui funds. The council also used the funds to prevent the South Korean government from installing the THAAD missile defense system.
Yun and Kyongdaehyo have repeatedly blocked the Japanese government’s attempts to resolve the comfort women issue. When Japan offered compensation to self-proclaimed comfort women in 1995, the council bribed them to refuse the funds. When some of the women received Japanese money anyway (Japan offered much more money than the council), the council published their names as prostitutes. And when Japan offered funding again in 2015, the council hid the process from the women and instead persuaded the government to reject the settlement.
North Korea, a neighboring nuclear-armed regime led by a mentally unstable sociopath, poses an existential threat to South Korea and Japan. The same goes for China. Japan and South Korea desperately need to work together to deter aggression from North Korea and China. North Korea and China hope to be too preoccupied with their mutual hostility to coordinate a response. Yun Mi-hyang is advancing key goals of North Korea and China while thwarting improvements in relations between South Korea and Japan.
Mr. Yoon, more than anyone else, ethnic nationalism This incites South Korea’s anti-Japanese hostility and prevents any kind of reconciliation. In this respect, she did exactly what the North Korean and Chinese regimes needed.
Our research shows the vital importance of academic freedom. Most (but not all) of the academics who have tried to stop us from speaking out on the comfort women issue do not realize that they are protecting North Korea. But that’s exactly the point. we have something to say. Academic freedom was the key to learning it.
In time, we hope that academic freedom will lead to thwarting North Korea’s plans. When we first began researching the comfort women issue, we had no idea what was behind the cries of “revisionism” and even misogyny, Holocaust denial, and “white supremacy” from academia. did. Without this research, we would not have known about North Korea’s role in the comfort women controversy.
We didn’t know that and neither did you.
Editor’s note:This essay has been reprinted from “Comfort Women Hoax: False Memoirs, North Korean Spies, and Special Attack Team in the Academic Swamp” Written by Jason M. Morgan and J. Mark Ramseyer (Encounter Books).
