War victims some would rather forget
Statue honoring ‘comfort women’ has critics saying we should move on
As much of the country debates pulling down controversial statues, San Francisco is about to put one up.
In just a few days, the 10-foot-tall “Women’s Column of Strength” will be loaded onto a flatbed truck at an artist’s studio in Carmel to lumber its way up to San Francisco’s Chinatown. On Sept. 22, the statue will be unveiled at a ceremony to acknowledge an atrocity that happened a half-world away many decades ago.
Unlike those argued-about statues in the South that honor the powerful white men who tried to secede from the United States, this new statue honors war victims. And Asian women at that.
For a privately funded statue depicting three girls and a grandma, the memorial sure is stirring up a lot of opposition. And that’s a shame.
The statue is a memorial to the euphemistically named “comfort women,” the 200,000 women from China, Korea, the Philippines and other countries who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military in World War II. Advocates of memorializing comfort women say many of them were raped by dozens of soldiers a day and that they died at greater rates during the war than men fighting on the front lines.
“The world knows so little about this,” said Lillian Sing, who retired as a San Francisco Superior Court judge in 2015 to ensure a comfort women statue was erected in San Francisco. Another retired Superior Court Judge, Julie Tang, is also leading the effort.
Sadly, there are those who wish the world would remain ignorant of comfort women and that the hubbub
would just go away.
Steven Whyte, the Carmel sculptor selected by the San Francisco Arts Commission to create the comfort women statue after the Board of Supervisors approved it in 2015, said he’s received more than 1,000 angry emails and phone calls demanding he stop work on the project. He rightfully ignored them all.
“I’m not really particularly interested in getting into the big debate about its existence with the naysayers and the deniers,” he said. “This is a story that has been hidden for so long that if it serves a purpose — to make people look into history and learn from history a little more — then my work is done.”
Whyte’s statue depicts three girls — one Chinese, one Korean and one Filipina — standing on top of a pedestal, holding hands. On the ground below them stands a grandmother. It will be erected on a terrace off the southeastern corner of St. Mary’s Square in Chinatown.
At the urging of thenSupervisor Eric Mar, the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the installation of the statue in 2015. The $205,000 to pay for it, plus extra money to maintain it, was raised privately by Sing and Tang’s group.
It is part of a growing movement to honor comfort women after some began telling their stories publicly in the 1990s. There are now about 50 comfort women statues around the world, many of which have drawn pushback from the Japanese government and some Japanese Americans.
A lawsuit seeking the removal of a comfort women statue in Glendale (Los Angeles County), which depicts a Korean girl sitting next to an empty chair, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court in March declined to hear the case, and the statue remains in place.
The Japanese government filed a brief in support of the plaintiffs, arguing that the United States should not intervene in a 2015 agreement between Japan and South Korea that “finally and irreversibly” settled the comfort women issue and came with money from Japan for the few dozen comfort women who are still alive.
But the intent of the statue isn’t to roil international relations. It’s to remember those whose brutal treatment has mostly been forgotten.
“History is history, whether it’s ugly or beautiful,” Sing said. “It’s true facts that need to be told.”
A request for comment from the Japanese Consulate in San Francisco wasn’t immediately returned.
A common line of opposition to the comfort women statues is that they will unfairly single out Japan for wartime atrocities, when history is riddled with countries doing terrible things during war.
Kathleen Kimura, co-chairwoman of the San Francisco-Osaka Sister City Association, said Japan has apologized and made many positive contributions since World War II, and that singling out the country in a statue memorializing comfort women is “a little bit unfair.”
“War is a horrible thing, and war brings out the worst in mankind,” Kimura said, noting that she was not speaking for the sister city organization. “My objection to all of this is this whole effort has been to single out Japan as the only bad guy.”
(Anybody who’s seen San Francisco’s Holocaust Memorial or the landmarked Japanese internment camps in California knows Japan is not being singled out.)
Janice Mirikitani, a renowned poet and longtime co-leader of Glide Memorial Church, took issue with the statue when it was before the supervisors. She and her Japanese American family were interned in camps by the United States government during World War II, which she said demonstrated that wartime atrocities are widespread.
“The only objection I had was that ... it singled out Japan and there would again be ill feelings arising about the Japanese,” she said the other day. “My concern was to universalize this more. Can’t we say that we elevate the comfort women’s movement as a symbol to speak out against atrocities of war against all women who have been victims of rape and indescribable torture?”
That is actually the hope of those behind the new statue — to speak out against sex trafficking and wartime atrocities of all kinds. It’s hard to take issue with that.