The Sculpture
If the Japanese hadn't done it someone would have anyway.
Posted on 11/24/2017 7:26:57 PM PST by nickcarraway
The mayor of Osaka, Japan, is making good on his threat to sever the sister-city relationship with San Francisco because of a Chinatown memorial honoring women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military before and during World War II.
The bronze sculpture that was placed in St. Mary’s Square in September shows three teenage girls holding hands next to an older woman. Though the artwork, known as the “Women’s Column of Strength,” was erected to honor female war victims, it’s seen by many Japanese citizens and government officials as an insult.
“This is highly regrettable,” Osaka Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura told reporters in Japan on Thursday. “The relationship of trust has completely been destroyed.”
Yoshimura made his comments after San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee signed a resolution Wednesday accepting the transfer of the statue onto city property. Yoshimura said he will cut ties with San Francisco by the end of the year.
Lee had sent a letter to Yoshimura on Oct. 2, saying he was “deeply disappointed,” after the Osaka mayor first threatened to end the sister-city relationship in response to the memorial.
The sculpture was the vision of two retired San Francisco Superior Court judges, Lillian Sing and Julie Tang, who wanted to memorialize the estimated 200,000 women from Asian-Pacific countries, known as “comfort women,” forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces from 1931 until the war ended in 1945.
It was the first sculpture to honor comfort women in a major American city and comes as historians gain a broader understanding of the atrocities perpetrated during the war. There are dozens of such statues in South Korea and a handful in small cities around the United States.
Tang said she was “outraged” after hearing Yoshimura’s comments. after the war.”
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
The Sculpture
If the Japanese hadn't done it someone would have anyway.
That, we did. I believe a few shells were lobbed on shore as a warning. The USA and other western powers interfered with Japan. The USA action resulted in Japan trying to quickly modernize, resulting in Japan defeating the Chinese in a war, whereupon the USA and western powers forced Japan to not conquer Chinese territory and make peace with China and Russia. Which later led to war with Russia which Japan won, and again western powers again interfered. During the war with China, the USA embargoed Japan and choked off supplies. Yes, Japan started WWII with the USA, but the Japanese were pretty ticked off at US interference by then. Wars don't always have simple beginnings.
I figured it out - they put it in Chinatown.
history is bitch especially if you are on the wrong side.
If the memory of the mass institutional rape and other atrocities the Japanese committed less than a lifetime ago has somehow "healed over" and been forgotten, then the infected abscess of their perverse revisionism should be surgically cut open and drained by building a statue like this in every city in the world. The horror of their despicable crimes should never be permitted to be forgotten by anyone. There is a good reason that the Japanese are the most hated and reviled nation in East Asia...they earned it!
Should there also be statues of political prisoners having their organs harvested by the communist chinese? We know it goes on.
LOL! That and the big, ugly ass, over-grown lizard with the worst bad breath in the world who comes outta Tokyo Bay every now and then.
Nice job of “coexisting” there, SF!
Amen! The Japs are arrogant beyond belief when it comes to accepting the horror they inflicted on so many peoples of Asia and the West.
How bout a statue to the 25 million Chinese murdered by Japan or killed with their Black Death flea bombs. Or better yet—lets put up a state of the Lady of Liberty the students built in Tenamenn (sp?) Square in Peking—when they protested Communism. Think that’s going to happen?
So how come San Francisco gets to keep its monument to slavery from a 72 year old war that has nothing to do with them, but a Confederate battle flag is completely out of the question?
Despite us having dropped the world’s first and only nuclear devices on Japan, the Japanese still got off much too easily from their criminal behavior in WW II. There were no Nuremburg trials, no public punishments of war criminals to speak of, no “Bushido (Nazi) Hunters”. The monster that tortured Louie Zamperini and his fellow captives died in bed.
“comfort women” did happen...and shouldn’t have happened”........
So did the civil war, but it DID HAPPEN. So, we removed all the historical evidence. Nothing changes.
Army Brat, Japan 1951-1961.
I never heard a Japanese kid say anything like that either.
Some years ago, my wife and I visited Pearl Harbor and took the tour of the Arizona Memorial. Motoring out to the shrine with us were a dozen Japanese young people, including several English speakers.
I asked one young woman why they were visiting the Arizona and she said, “We wanted to see what our fathers and grandfathers had done. It’s not generally known in Japan.”
But the mayor was happy to have a sister city full of sexually confused people.
when was the last time you visited Japan? and how often in the last 20 years? and where in Japan did you go?
Many trips to Japan I have had in the last 30 years and never, when I encountered groups of students, did they EVER ask me “why did you bomb us”. Their questions were always about American places and American celebrities, with them wanting to know if I was familiar with various American places or people. No asked “why did you bomb us”.
I am very glad you and I are both on this thread, lest readers get some posters misinformation about Japan as it is today.
I think Japan does leave off some serious questioning of it’s military-imperial past, particularly in its academic curriculum.
I also think that in most ways Japan today is not the Japan of its military-imperial era, and in it’s general relations with all its Asian neighbors is behaving as one of the most responsible and charitable nations.
Some of those who criticize Japan most have their own historical issues they too try as hard as they can to sweep under the rug. Some are even now not governed as democratically or with as peaceful intents as Japan. In some ways I’d like to say to many of them - let you who are without sin cast the first stone.
Some years ago, WSJ ran a piece on a Japanese military officer who took the train to his base each morning. He always wore civilian clothes coming and going.
This "teacher" was later transferred by the district to positions and subject matter which severely restricted her ability to proselytize children.
Thus, I am not stating Wuli's experience was impossible, merely uncommon based on my own experience and, apparently, Eric's as well. I did not actually sit in a class, merely reviewed the text books.
My reply would be to ask a question to answer their question....”Why did we work to restore your nation and give you back your independence; should we not have killed your emperor and left your nation a burning wreck?” (and then go silent and walk away).
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