Flowers for Lolas: The comfort women statues as reminders of Japanese wartime atrocities

SEOUL, South Korea – The gaze of the “Statue of Peace” is a reminder that the comfort women’s shameful and negative memories should not be forgotten but instead be remembered.

During my recent visit in Seoul, I saw the first “Statue of Peace” in front of the Japanese Embassy which was installed on Dec. 14,  2011.

The small bronze figure depicts a girl sitting in a chair, staring straight ahead with a look of determination. She has cropped hair and wears a hanbok — a traditional Korean dress. She’s barefoot. Her fist is clenched. Next to her is an empty chair.

The gaze has been directed at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul as a call for vigilance in their campaign for justice as the varied stories and individual memories of ‘comfort women’ tend to be neglected and seem to be transformed into places of amnesia.

The statue is an unsmiling girl frozen in time as a teenager, at the age when she was forced into sexual slavery the Japanese imperial military which seems to evoke empathy for the comfort women’s pain and trauma. It has become a gathering spot for protest groups related to the  the Japanese wartime record.

There are more than 130 identical statues that have been installed across South Korea since 2011.

It was 31 years ago, on Aug. 14, 1991, when South Korean Kim Hak-sun became the first Korean to give a public testimony about her experience as a comfort woman victim. Hak-sun died on December 1997 at age 74.

About 200,000 women from Japanese- occupied countries like Korea, China, Burma, New Guinea, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaya, Manchukuo, Taiwan (then a Japanese dependency), the Dutch East Indies, Portuguese Timor, and the Philippines were held in captivity and many thousands more were raped as part of one of the largest operations of sexual violence in modern history.

The girls who were abducted, trafficked or brought to the Japanese soldiers’ camps had their own dreams and visions for the future that were shattered a damaged in utter injustice.

Due to their tender age, it was a painful experience for them to be subjected to sexual slavery, rape and other forms of sexual violence during World War 2.

The victims have spent their lives in misery, having endured physical injuries, pain and disability, and mental and emotional suffering. The survivors have had to live a life full of stigma and  trauma.

The Women’s Tribunal that sat in Tokyo, Japan from Dec. 8 to 12, 2000, deliberated on the criminal liability of high-ranking Japanese military and political officials, as well as the Japanese state’s responsibility for military rape and sexual slavery.

On July 30, 2007, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution asking the Japanese government to apologize to former comfort women and include a curriculum about them in Japanese schools. The resolution was passed after three former comfort women (one Dutch and two Koreans) testified.

In 2012, the South Korean government declared Aug. 14 as the International Memorial Day for Comfort Women.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in described Japan’s wartime use of comfort women as “crimes against humanity.”

In January  2021, a  judge at the Seoul Central District Court ruled in favor of the comfort women ordering Japan to pay compensation for the first time.

However, another  South Korean court on April 2021  upheld Japan’s state immunity to dismiss a lawsuit, contradicting  the earlier ruling.

I earlier saw the comfort women statue in San Francisco, California called “Column of Strength” which  is one of nine and the first sculpture placed in a major U.S. city to commemorate the comfort women.

It depicts three teen-age girls, with each being of a specific nationality—Chinese, Korean, and Filipino. These three girls are cast in bronze, standing in a circle atop a pedestal and holding hands in a back-to-back posture. Standing next to the pedestal and gazing up at them is another bronze figure of a halmoni (Korean for grandmother).

A year after Hak-sun’s revelation, Lola Rosa Henson was the first Filipina comfort woman to come out on Sept. 18, 1992 with her story.

The “Lola” statue initially installed in December 2017 along Roxas Boulevard was dismantled on April 27, 2018. It was an unnamed woman wearing a traditional Filipino dress, blindfolded, with hands clutched to her chest. It was declared missing in August 2019.

Another comfort woman statue —of a young woman with fists resting on her lap—has been removed from the Catholic-run Mary Mother of Mercy shelter for the elderly and the homeless in San Pedro, Laguna, only two days after its unveiling in January 2019.

The remaining Filipina comfort woman “Lola” statue is now in Pandan, Antique.

The comfort women campaign highlights the urgency as attempts to whitewash history and to distort narratives continue while the number of survivors is diminishing.

(Atty. Dennis R. Gorecho heads the seafarers’ division of the Sapalo Velez Bundang Bulilan law offices. For comments, e-mail [email protected], or call 0917-5025808 or 0908-8665786.)

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