Ramsayer, Korea and me

by liberal japonicus

This paper dropped, which has a lot of interesting stuff for me, but I might have to put it in context for people not marinating themselves in these topics.

J. Mark Ramsayer is an American legal scholar who is the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard. He first broke thru on my radar when a controversy about a paper he wrote about burakumin, a caste in Japan that was the rough equivalent of ‘untouchables’ in India. He followed that up with an article on ianfu or ‘comfort women’ (a term which describes women who worked in Japanese military brothels during WWII). More recently, he wrote an article and was then asked to write a chapter in an Oxford Handbook on Koreans in Japan. The wikipedia page gives a note on the burakumin, a slightly longer section on the Koreans in Japan chapter and a really long section on the comfort women article.

These multiple controversies are interesting to me not simply because they are about historical memory and Japan, but because I see a thread that runs through my choices and Morris-Suzuki’s article, which is about a different article, puts those into focus.

I imagined myself to be pretty good at languages when I first came to Japan and, like the little kid who says he will grow up to pitch in the world series, I had this notion that I would knock off Japanese first, then use that to get to Chinese and a brief interlude in Korea would get me up to speed on all three. Easy peasy.

Tiananmen Square happened a little bit after I arrived in Japan, which put a kibosh on going to China and at any rate, the pool of learning about Japanese and Japanese culture quickly became an immense ocean. Some twists and turns, but I ended up where I am now, in Kyushu, in a foreign language department that did English and Chinese and Korean and I had not only Japanese colleagues, but also Korean and Chinese. The dream was still alive, but got crushed under the weight of Japanese administrative work and life in general. And in the context of a Japanese university, I can see how easy it is to unthinkingly adopt Japanese frameworks to explain Chinese and Korean culture. Which is why I (painfully) draw a line from Ramsayer to me. Even having my Korean and Chinese colleagues (from whom I learned a lot), it is easy for me to see that a person ensconced in a bubble of Japanese culture might not recognize or even see how that bubble can alter your viewpoint. I think this is a particular problem for academics specializing in East Asia because of the problem I faced: Getting fluent in one language/culture is tough, in two is exponentially tougher and three requires something on the level of cosmic coincidence.

Perhaps I’m just rationalizing my own failure, but I also wonder if it would be possible to even do it on the route I imagined, which was start with Japanese, go to Chinese and then pick up Korean. Looking back on it, getting up to speed in Japanese really ruled out Chinese for me, and I find my Japanese interferes with my Korean more than it helps. There is a catalogue of reasons I can give for this, which might be just me making excuses, but as much as I learn about China/Chinese and Korea/Korean, the more I realize that scaffolding on my Japanese experience both helps and hurts that. While I don’t have a lot of information on Ramsayer’s language ability, I am assuming that he has some Japanese, but no Korean to speak of, though it is also possible that he has assistants who carry out his Japanese research for him.

If you go to the paper, by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, you’ll find that Ramsayer produced a pretty incredible catalogue of misinterpretations, misreadings, mistranslations, overgeneralizations, specious reasoning and axiomatic errors, all from an article that was simply ‘corrected‘. Morris-Suzuki discusses how the problems of peer review contributed to the acceptance of an article that is clearly wrong in its data and conclusions, and it is an important point, but I’m interested in how Ramsayer could end up in the place he did.

I noted that Ramsayer is the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies and his wikipedia page notes that he received Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon in recognition of “his extensive contributions to the development of Japanese studies in the U.S. and the promotion of understanding toward Japanese society and culture.” He also co-authors papers with a number of Japanese authors, one of whom is Yoshihiro Miwa, and one of the works they co-authored was entitled The Fable of the Keiretsu, which begins like this:

Most of what we collectively think we know about the Japanese economy is urban legend. In fact –* The keiretsu do not exist, and never did. An entrepreneurial “research institute” in the 1950s created the rosters to sell to Marxist economists looking for the “monopoly capital” that their theory told them would dominate their “bourgeois capitalist” world. Western scholars hoping for examples of culture-specific forms of economic organization then brought them back to the U.S. * The zaibatsu did not succeed pre-war because they bought politicians, exploited the poor, or manipulated disfunctional capital markets. They succeeded for all the usual varied reasons a few firms succeed in any modern economy. They acquired the (perjorative) zaibatsu label because they happened to be thriving when muckraking journalists in the 1920s and 30s came looking for someone to blame for the depression.

The invocation of a Marxist research institute at the heart of a conspiracy probably tells you all you need, but don’t take my word for it. From one review

On what grounds do Miwa and Ramsayer base their claim that so much of what has long been said about the Japanese economy’s distinctive organizational attributes is patently false? First, they attack the credibility of the sources. The purveyors of the keiretsu and related models of Japanese distinctiveness, it seems, have flawed credentials. As Marxist ideologues, journalistic popularizers, “culturalist” sociologists, institutional economists who stray from neoclassical orthodoxy, academics with ivory-tower ignorance of real-world business practice, they are not to be believed. The authors then evaluate the actual evidence marshaled for the keiretsu model, but they do so in a selective and cursory way. Much serious research supporting that model is overlooked; other work is cited only to disparage a finding or a conclusion as preposterous on its face.

One might wonder how Ramsayer got where he was. Well, his co-author Miwa is an Emeritus Professor from the University of Tokyo, which is like Harvard and Yale and a few other Ivies rolled into one. And while the presence of one co-author from Tokyo University may not seem like a lot, I’m pretty sure that being in those circles does not allow the development of contacts in other circles. And while peer review is anonymous, I’m guessing that whoever peer reviewed the Ramsayer article was one degree of separation from Miwa.

If you’ve read this far, you probably think that I believe Ramsayer is some sort of idiot. I don’t. However, the pattern I see is a person whose academic capital is firmly ensconced in a web of relationships with academics who are either Japanese or who only research Japan. Reading Morris, it seems to me that the first third of the article, entitled Social Capital and the Problems of Opportunistic Leadership: The Example of Koreans in Japan, was peer reviewed by lawyers and economists familiar with Japan or with the models Ramsayer was using, but obviously not with Korean-Japanese history, but the latter two thirds, which is devoted to that history, was simply taken for granted. And while the mistakes that Ramsayer makes are grievous, I have to wonder what sort of assumptions and ideas float around in writing and presentations that are not as salient, but mistaken nonetheless. As Morris-Suzuki points out:

Like viral fragments in water, disembodied phrases about crime, deviance and dysfunction swirl through society, ending end up in streets and tweets, in playgrounds and classrooms. They are picked up by flag-waving demonstrators, who resurrect groundless 1923 rumours about the crimes of ‘recalcitrant Koreans’ (Nishimura and Kitano 2020) and who tell fourth and fifth generation Zainichi Koreans to ‘go home’ (Kim-Watchuka 2019; Hall 2021, pp. 49‒51). They lodge themselves in the consciousness of young Zainichi Koreans, who are torn between the effort to come to terms with and express their ethnic identity, and the fear of being humiliated as ‘dysfunctional’ , ‘unhygienic’ , ‘criminal’ etc. if they dare to use their real names (see, for example, Fukuoka 2000, 84‒86; Mainichi Shimbun 2021). I have encountered at first hand the devastation that this can wreak on the lives of young Koreans in Japan, as they struggle to sort out their identities in a complex and conflict-ridden world. And of course, the psychological damage can cut both ways – some Koreans, offended by such academically unsubstantiated insults, launch into tirades against ‘the Japanese’, which can inflict psychological harm on Japanese people who have no responsibility for disseminating messages like the one I have quoted above.

The article was useful to remind me to consider the things I take as given, pick them up and turn them over to see what is underneath.