The San Francisco memorial depicts three women holding hands standing in a circle on top of a cylinder. The inscription is expected to be published in five languages — English, Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Tagalog — and is expected to read:
“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 Asia-Pacific countries from 1931 to 1945. Most of these women died during their wartime captivity. The dark history was hidden for decades until the 1990s when the survivors courageously broke their silence. They helped move the world to declare that sexual violence as a strategy of war is a crime against humanity for which governments must be held accountable.
This memorial is dedicated to the memory of these women, and to eradicating sexual violence and sex trafficking throughout the world.”
Why Japan is losing its battle against statues of colonial-era ‘comfort women’
（略）
Modern-day problems
Ironically, Tokyo's anger about the statues might have aided their spread. “My sense is that the [Japanese government's] fixation on the statue increased its significance to activists,” said Celeste Arrington, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University.
（略）
“It may be 2017, but Japan is still fighting to deny and erase this egregious war crime and basically waiting for all the “Comfort Women” to die, so they don’t need to acknowledge the government’s responsibility,” Lillian Sing and Julie Tang, two retired judges who are chairs of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition (CWJC), which organized the installation of the statue, said in a statement.
（略）
In recent years, the Japanese government has promoted the idea of “cool Japan” in a bid for nonmilitary, soft power overseas. But the grass-roots movement to install comfort-women statues undermines that effort, reminding the world of some of the darkest moments in Japanese military history.
“They have a strong sensitivity to how Japan is seen in the world. They see this as tarnishing Japan,” said Jennifer Lind, author of “Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics.” "[But] the more they try and squelch this? That's actually what ends up tarnishing Japan.”
