Photos by Kevin Lee
A comfort women statue erected on a park on the edge of San Francisco Chinatown and the city’s financial district has been vandalized several times, reports CGTN.
The statue was found with paint splattered on the statue, the grandmother’s eyes painted white and the inscription scratched up at least four times.
“The deep scratches and the four separate incidents of vandalism look to be very intentional. It looks to me like a hate crime, not like some young kids coming around, having fun and painting the eyes. It’s not that simple,” said Julie Tang, a retired judge and co-chair of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition.
The incidents come as the one year anniversary of the memorial is approaching and just days after the mayor of Osaka, Japan once again threatened to severe the sister-city relationship with San Francisco.
In a letter to San Francisco Mayor London Breed, the San Francisco Chronicle reports Osaka Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura wrote “the city of Osaka has currently reached a state where we must reevaluate our sister city relationship with San Francisco and terminate the sister city affiliation.”
“I think it (the vandalism) has something to do with Osaka mayor’s letter, because the information has been propagated,” said Tang to CGTN.
Yoshimura, in his letter, called the claims inscribed on the statue one sided, and said the facts had been disputed by historians. He had previously threatened to severe the sister-city relationship when Mayor Ed Lee was still alive, but seemed to back off after Lee’s death.
Both Breed and Lee have refused to remove the statue.
“It’s a 60 year old relationship with Osaka — not with the government, but with the people,” said Tang to the San Francisco Examiner.
“I was a judge for 26 years in San Francisco, this is about justice and it’s about women’s rights,” said Tang. “We have the women here who suffered, who testified, who told the world what happened to them. These are [living] witnesses, you can’t get better than that in a court of law.”
AsAmNews has Asian America in its heart. We’re an all-volunteer effort of dedicated staff and interns. Check out our Twitter feed and Facebook page for more content. Please consider interning, joining our staff or submitting a story.
RE: Comfort Women Statue in San Francisco Vandalized as Tensions Rise: Can we put a Hiroshima and Nagasaki memorial in America also?
RE: Comfort Women Statue in San Francisco Vandalized as Tensions Rise: Sean, I think that is a fair question, Hiroshima was a tragedy which America maybe responsible. However, Japan should face the fact that their war time atrocities has caused great harm to other countries, including the comfort women issue.
RE: Comfort Women Statue in San Francisco Vandalized as Tensions Rise: The amerikans continued the practice of forcing Korean women into sexual slavery for decades. Instead of building statues in the metropole, the amerikans should pay reparations and withdraw their troops and weapons from the Korean peninsula.