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“ Mitsubishi submitted a million dollars for the Harvard professorship.
September 22, 1972. An article with this title appeared in the New York Times (NYT). Mitsubishi, a Japanese company, donated a million dollars to Harvard University and said, “Please establish a professor of Japanese studies position at the law school.” NYT writes: “It is unusual for Mitsubishi, which accumulated enormous wealth after the war, to donate large sums to American universities, not Japanese universities.”
Fifty years later, the Mitsubishi name emerged at the center of a conflict of interest surrounding corporate sponsorship of universities. John Mark Ramsayer, who works as a professor at the university’s Mitsubishi, surprised the victims of Korean comfort women and their descendants with a treatise glorifying Japanese history. Fortunately, with the swift response from the Harvard Law School Korean Students Association, a debate about the objectivity of this article began in the American academy.
Maeil Economic Daily confirmed the March 2019 report (titled “ Comforting Women and Teachers ”), the first draft of Ramsay’s thesis on the 12th, and raised the possibility that this thesis was a dangerous academic poster created with business support. The professor in the Department of History at Princeton University who helped with the thesis was “Professor Nissan,” sponsored by another Japanese company, Nissan. Emeritus Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, has also been sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The issue of conflicts of interest in corporate funds donated to the Hall of Truth has been a subject of long debate. For example, it is difficult to accurately analyze the impact of carbonated beverages on national obesity at the universities where Coca-Cola donates large sums. It is also criticized that it is difficult to objectively measure the risk of climate change in universities sponsored by oil conglomerates.
Ramsay’s thesis with Mitsubishi and Nissan professors cannot be free from this debate. Ramsey’s thesis is silent in the 1993 “Kono Speech” when the Japanese government officially recognized forced mobilization. Exclude adverse historical events to reach a specific conclusion.
It is also very inconvenient for Japanese corporate law experts, not historians, to analyze whether or not a forced mobilization has occurred. Ramsay’s thesis published in June last year dealt with a supply contract between a sake brewery and a grower.
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