OSAKA, Japan, is terminating its six-decade sister-city relationship with San Francisco after the latter designated a memorial to comfort women as city property.
The relationship of trust is gone, said the mayor, Hirofumi Yoshimura, who had called the memorial a form of Japan-bashing, according to The Japan Times. Earlier this year, he and the Osaka governor, Ichiro Matsui, said the memorial was “mistaken history.”
The memorial reads: “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 thirteen Asian-Pacific countries from 1931 to 1945.”
Supporters of the memorial are standing firm: “[Prime Minister Shinzo] Abe’s policy of denial of the comfort women history and fake news has been now defeated. Let the record stand that neither the San
Francisco mayor nor the Board of Supervisors nor the citizens will be bullied by the Japanese government when it comes to protecting all women from sexual violence,” said Julie Tang, co-chairman of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition.
Here at home, a seven-foot bronze statue of a Filipino comfort woman was recently unveiled along Roxas Boulevard.
So far, no adverse reactions from the Japanese government have yet been noted. We wonder whether it is because the statue completely escaped attention, or whether they did not think the issue was significant enough to merit a reaction.
Comfort women from the Philippines kept their silence for decades, even with their own families, before recounting their stories. Some of them carried their secrets to the grave. Now there are just a few of them and they are neither healthy nor strong enoughto keep up the fight for long. They need many things in their old age and fragile state, but first and foremost they need an acknowledgment that their
ordeal indeed happened. Revisionism subjects them to shame and insignificance all over again.
The present spokesman of the Duterte administration, Harry Roque, used to represent a group of comfort women in a landmark case—in which they lost. In April 2010 the Supreme Court ruled that the women’s petition had no merit because “from a domestic law perspective, the Executive Department has the exclusive prerogative to determine whether to espouse petitioners’ claims against Japan.” The court also said that the Philippines is “not under any international obligation to espouse the petitioners’ claims.” They appealed but lost again.
The nation faces a lot of problems. A handful of old women with a dark past not of their own doing do not look like they stand a good chance of being given priority in their concern. Let the statue stand to tell everyone this part of history must not be forgotten.