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Professor Mark Ramseyer and the Buraku Question: an Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Extract
Throughout his career J Mark Ramseyer (hereafter JMR) has delighted in generating an academic reputation as a contrarian who applies the “rationality of social science” to explain aspects of modern Japanese history that he considers others both in Japan and elsewhere to have failed to comprehend. His usual method is to create a simple model that he thinks illustrates the basic dynamics of the situation and then apply the logic of rational choice/game theory to it. It was probably only a matter of time before he turned his attention to some of the most controversial topics in twentieth century Japanese social history: Zainichi Koreans, the “comfort women” (ianfu) issue, Okinawans, and Burakumondai.
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References
Notes
1 See for example articles by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Amy Stanley et al., Alexis Dudden in the March 1 2021 edition of The Asia-Pacific Journal, and “Seeking the True Story of Comfort Women: How a Harvard Professor’s Dubious Scholarship Reignited a History of Mistrust between South Korea and Japan” by Jeannie Suk Gersen in The New Yorker, 25 February 2021.
2 Outcaste Politics and Organized Crime in Japan: The Effect of Terminating Ethnic Subsidies J. Mark Ramseyer & Eric B. Rasmusen, Discussion Paper No. 932, 09/2017. On the Invention of Identity Politics: The Buraku Outcastes in Japan, J. Mark Ramseyer, Discussion Paper No. 964, 06/2018, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA 02138.
3 In the 2018 article he described Burakumin as “… descendants of people who had worked in ritually unclean jobs such as butchering and tanning.” RELS p 193.
4 Hirschman, Albert O. 1970. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
5 The paper by Akuzawa and Saitō provides some further background to this court case.
6 And there are indeed two brief recordings on YouTube in which he introduces his followers to the second JMR paper with some enthusiasm.
7 See for example, “There are no mistakes in Professor Ramseyer’s article” Arima Tetsuo, Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact.
8 Kitano Ryuichi, 慰安婦だけでなく部落問題でも:米ハーバード大教授の論文に「撤回要求」相次ぐ (Not only Ianfu, Demands Are Also Being Made for the Withdrawal of Harvard Professor”s articles on Buraku Mondai.) AERA. dot, 2021.3.26.
9 “Statement: Problem of Ramseyer’s Article on Buraku: from the Perspective of Human Rights and Non-Discrimination” International Movement Against Discrimination and Racism, International Dalit Solidarity Network and Minority Rights Group International.
10 Chalmers Johnson and E. B. Keehn, “A Disaster in the Making: Rational Choice and Asian Studies,” The National Interest no. 36. (1994): 16.