Osaka Mayor lobbies SF Mayor London Breed about ‘Comfort Women’ statue

Post published:August 29, 2018
Post category:CWJC Updates / In the News / SF Memorial

Reporter Heather Knight interviewed CWJC Co-Chairs about their continued fight for justice and the vandalism of the memorial.

The controversial “Women’s Column of Strength” statue in Chinatown has now been in place for nearly a year, but the fight over whether it should stay remains as heated as ever.

The statue — three Asian girls standing on a pedestal holding hands and a grandmother standing down below — represents “comfort women,” the 200,000 women from China, Korea and the Philippines who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II.

Unidentified assailants clearly aren’t happy about the statue. First, somebody scratched up the panel describing it. That was replaced, but it was scratched up again.

Then somebody splattered green and white paint on the grandmother’s dress and colored her eyes white, making her look like a creepy ghost. I asked a spokeswoman for the Arts Commission on Monday morning if the statue would be repaired; she said later it was cleaned up by late Monday afternoon.

Lillian Sing and Julie Tang, retired San Francisco Superior Court judges who spearheaded the installation of the statue, noticed the defacement a few weeks ago while taking visitors to see the artwork.

“I was shocked and hurt,” Sing said. “It’s a deliberate act of vandalism that represents some kind of hate for our message.”

There is plenty of hate for their message, though whether the vandalism is related is anybody’s guess.

The statue is one of dozens around the world that are part of a growing movement to honor comfort women. But some Japanese Americans and government officials in Japan want the statues pulled down, saying it’s unfair to target Japan for wartime atrocities when so many other countries engaged in terrible acts of war. Some have also disputed the numbers of comfort women and the severity of their treatment.

Hirofumi Yoshimura, the mayor of Osaka, Japan, told Mayor Ed Lee in November he would sever the sister-city relationship with San Francisco by the end of the year, saying the 60-year-old tie between the cities had been “completely destroyed” by Lee’s acceptance of the statue on public land.

Apparently, Yoshimura backed off after Lee’s death in mid-December. But he waited less than two weeks after Mayor London Breed’s inauguration July 11 to write to her, again saying he will terminate the relationship if the statue isn’t removed from public land. He gave her until the end of September to respond.

He wrote that there’s disagreement over the number of comfort women, “the degree to which the Japanese military was involved” and the extent of harm to the women.

“Yet uncertain and one-sided claims are inscribed onto the Comfort Women Memorial plaque as historical facts,” he wrote.

READ THE COMPLETE LETTER HERE

Breed’s team forwarded the letter to the local leaders of the San Francisco-Osaka Sister City Association, who responded to Yoshimura that the sister city is not a partnership between two governments, but is instead a relationship between both cities’ nonprofits, businesses and civic organizations.

“We will continue to pursue people-to-people exchanges with the citizens of Osaka,” their letter states.

As for Breed, she supports leaving the statue in St. Mary’s Square, said her spokesman, Jeff Cretan.

In the meantime, Sing and Tang are doubling down on their backing of the statue and the women it represents. They’re behind a new display of portraits of real-life comfort women that will be on view Sept. 4-20 at the California State Building, 350 McAllister St. It will then be displayed at City College’s Chinatown campus at 808 Kearny St.

They’ve also planned a first anniversary celebration of the statue’s installation called “Standing Tall” for 11 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 22, at 651 California St. It will be immediately followed by a procession to City College’s Chinatown campus for lunch and a screening of “Da Han,” a documentary on the life of a Chinese comfort woman.