SF to set up first 'comfort women' memorial

San Francisco is expected to receive next month a "comfort women" memorial as a gift from an activist group that calls it the first-ever memorial to "comfort women" in a major US city.

The memorial's inscription received approval from the San Francisco Arts Commission this week.

The statue, which depicts a trio of women with linked hands as a fourth woman looks on, is expected to be installed at St. Mary's Square in Chinatown this year.

The project, which was unanimously approved by the city's board of supervisors in 2015, is spearheaded by retired San Francisco superior court judges Julie Tang and Lillian Sing, who co-chair the Comfort Women Justice Coalition, which funded the work.

"This monument bears witness to the suffering of hundreds of thousands of women and girls euphemistically called 'Comfort Women,' who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces in 13 Asian-Pacific countries from 1931 to 1945," the inscription reads.

"Most of these women died during their wartime captivity," it continues. "This dark history was largely hidden for decades until the 1990s, when the survivors courageously broke their silence. They helped move the world to declare that sexual violence as a strategy of war is a crime against humanity for which governments must be held accountable."

The coalition, as well as survivors and their families, say the memorial is

necessary because Japan has never formally apologized for the suffering it inflicted on these women.

Some Japanese and members of the Japanese-American community argue that the memorial's message is divisive.

The Japanese right wing tried to "kill" the project from the very beginning by lobbying the San Francisco government at every level, according to Tang.

Tang said the last effort by the Japanese opposition at the San Francisco Arts Commission was the most intense. The agency reportedly received more than 200 emails, mostly from Japan, opposing the memorial's installation.

The most prominent objection was from Hirofumi Yoshimura, mayor of Osaka, a sister city of San Francisco.

But San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee pushed back.

"Their (the coalition) request was not unprecedented, as San Francisco has many public and private memorials that commemorate some of history's darkest moments, as well as call for peace and reconciliation," he wrote in a letter dated Feb 3 to Hirofumi.

"One thing they (the Japanese right wing) cannot kill is history," said Tang. "The documents gathered around the world by all the former 'comfort women' prove that what Japan committed was one of the greatest atrocities in the Second World War and in modern history."

During the Asia-Pacific War, the Japanese military forced hundreds of thousands of women across Asia into "comfort stations" where they were repeatedly raped and tortured by Japanese soldiers. Most of the women were from China and Korea.

Sing said it was meaningful to erect the memorial in San Francisco, whose population is 35 percent Asian descent, many of them Chinese.

She called it unbelievable for a foreign government to try and disrupt the righteous cause of a grassroots group in the US.

"What are they afraid of? They are afraid of the truth! It's never divisive to tell the truth," she said. "We need to remember the past so that all wounds can heal."

Last year, a lawsuit was filed against the city of Glendale, California, calling for the removal of a "comfort women" memorial statue erected in a community park in 2013. The plaintiff claimed the statue unconstitutionally disrupted the federal government's relations with Japan.

Last August, an appellate court upheld the dismissal of the lawsuit.

Sing called the ruling significant, because it showed that those who object to the "comfort women" memorial in San Francisco would also not prevail.

liazhu@chinadailyusa.com