It’s official: the Japanese mayor of Osaka sent a letter this week terminating San Francisco’s six-decade sister city relationship with his city, due to objections to the comfort women statue erected in San Francisco, reports KTVU.
The Comfort Women: Column of Strength statue honors the estimated 200,000 “comfort women” from China, Korea, and the Philippines forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II.
“It is unfortunate that Mayor Yoshimura no longer wishes to maintain ties between the governments of San Francisco and Osaka,” said Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for San Francisco Mayor London Breed, reports the San Francisco Examiner. “However, we will remain sister cities via the people-to-people ties maintained by our San Francisco-Osaka Sister City Committee and their counterparts in Osaka.”
Many officials in Japan, including Osaka Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura, claim the number of comfort women and the severity of their treatment are both exaggerated, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. They also think Japan shouldn’t be singled out for wartime atrocities when many other countries have also committed terrible acts of war.
The statue has drawn intense opposition from the Japanese government since its approval and has already been vandalized several times. Yoshimura had asked the late SF mayor Ed Lee and then Breed to remove the statue from public land, threatening multiple times to sever the sister-city relationship. Both Lee and Breed declined.
“Breaking the relationship over a memorial is outrageous and absurd,” said Lillian Sing, co-chair of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition. “It shows how afraid the Osaka mayor and Japanese prime minister are of truth and are trying to deny history.”
The memorial statue was given to the city of San Francisco in 2015 as a gift by the Comfort Women Justice Committee and was erected in Chinatown last year by California’s Korean, Chinese, and Filipino communities.
Sing said that members of the Osaka Citizens Alliance recently visited in celebration of the one-year anniversary of the statue’s installation on Sept. 22.
“Osaka citizens came to support us, and came to give us a message for the mayor and Board of Supervisors that they oppose their mayor’s positions,” said Sing. “Citizens of Osaka stand in support and solidarity with us.”
The San Francisco Examiner reports that the Japanese consulate in San Francisco declined to comment.
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RE: Japanese Mayor Cuts Sister-city Ties with San Francisco Over Comfort Women Statue: In 2015 Japan began the formal process of an apology and restitutions. Asian countries want more. Japan must continue to acknowledge the wrongdoing of the past. Dealing with pain is the road to healing, no running from it. Sister City programs help bring dialogue, comordare, and understanding. I hope that will not be squandered.