Fight over ‘comfort women’ statue pits two communities against each other

To its Korean American proponents, the statue would pay welcome attention to one of World War II’s lesser-known atrocities — how Korean women were detained and raped by the Japanese army during World War II.

But to some in the Japanese American community in the Philadelphia area, the proposed monument would only stir up anti-Asian hatred and even violence.

These differing views lie at the heart of a simmering dispute in which advocates from two of the region’s Asian communities and others have squared off in an at times sharp-edged dispute.

The fight is being waged over a proposal before the city’s Art Commission calling for the installation of a bronze statue in a landscaped plaza off Front Street near Catharine Street in Queen Village. The artwork, the replica of a model placed in 35 countries so far, shows a mournful-looking young woman sitting on a chair with an empty chair beside her. A bird has landed on her shoulder. The bird is said to symbolize freedom and peace; the empty chair signifies the need for dialogue about the war crime.

Starting in the early 1930s, occupying Japanese troops forced many thousands of Korean women to provide sex to soldiers in army-sponsored brothels. The soldiers euphemistically dubbed them “comfort women.”

Many of the women died during the war. Others kept silent for decades until survivors began speaking out 30 years ago. While Japan has made a series of apologies and in 2015 set up a reparations fund, rancor over this tragic history remains deep between the two countries, fueled in part by remarks by some Japanese leaders minimizing responsibility.

Philadelphian Shinjoo Cho, the musician and former city commerce staffer who had led the drive for the statue, said at a public hearing that a “failure to face the past will not bring peace to future generations.” She and her group, part of the Korean American Association of Greater Philadelphia, call the monument “The Statue of Peace.”

“Our desire is to have this project contribute to and join the movement for gender and racial equity,” Cho testified. “We do not ignore the victims or their voices because of our preference to avoid discomfort or have challenging conversations. We believe that this plaza and the artwork will truly help us get there together.”

» READ MORE: $500K Harriet Tubman statue controversy gets national attention, prompts a petition, and elicits the sculptor’s response

Critics say the statue will deepen divisions, not heal them. They say by accepting it, Philadelphia would be taking sides in an ongoing dispute between Korea and Japan more than 75 years after the end of the Second World War. They also say the monument would violate the city’s official directive governing public art, which limits statues to those that recognize people or events that “have made significant contributions to Philadelphia and beyond.”

Makoto Funaki, the medical scientist who is president of the Japanese Association of Greater Philadelphia, said the monument could stir up violence.

“Our chief concern is that the comfort women statue will incite further anti-Asian harassment, violence, and acrimony, especially as directed against Japanese Americans and other Japanese people,” Funaki said last week in an email. “It has been a source of hate, violence and harassment in South Korea and we do not want that here in Philadelphia.”

Funaki was in Japan last week and not available for an interview. Cho was also out of the country but spoke at length at the hearing.

The statue’s fate is expected to be decided soon by a vote of the nine-member Art Commission.

» READ MORE: How Mayor Jim Kenney abruptly ended years of delays to remove the Frank Rizzo statue

The debate comes after two years of heightened scrutiny of statues in the city. Last year, a city judge rebuked Mayor Jim Kenney for his planned removal of a statue of Christopher Columbus that stands deeper in South Philadelphia, saying the mayor had violated the directive’s rules on removals. Kenney, who has called Columbus a brutal enslaver in an official statement, has appealed the opinion. The statue remains on site, but boxed up and covered from view. In 2020, Kenney also removed the statue of former Mayor Frank L. Rizzo across from City Hall.

The “comfort women” statue was first put up in 2011 in Seoul, the South Korean capital — across from the Japanese Embassy. There, it has become a gathering spot for dueling protest groups at odds over the Japanese wartime record.

The monument has attracted controversy elsewhere and even opposition from the Japanese government. In 2017, Japan filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court supporting a bid to remove a statue in Glendale, Calif., the first one erected in the United States. Its brief said Glendale had sought to “disrupt the United States’ foreign policy” encouraging good relations between Japan and South Korea.

The Supreme Court declined to hear the case. A Glendale spokesperson said the statue has been a quiet presence and was sometimes the backdrop for peaceful events.

The following year, Osaka severed its “sister city” relationship with San Francisco over the bay city’s siting of a similar statue.

» READ MORE: Judge rules that Christopher Columbus statue can stay in South Philly

In Philadelphia, backers gathered support or at least non-opposition quickly. In early 2018, the Queen Village Neighbors Association formally notified the city that it wouldn’t oppose it.

An early supporter was City Councilmember Helen Gym, one of two Korean Americans on the body. “This statue is meant to increase our understanding of what happened to Korean comfort women and the horrors of war and to honor the struggle of women who experience sexual violence and abuse,” Gym said last week.

City Councilmember Mark F. Squilla, whose district includes the location of the proposed statue, formally endorsed it, too. “I fully support this request,” he wrote in 2018.

While Gym has stood by her position, Squilla has backpedaled. His chief of staff said last week Squilla would accept the final vote of the Art Commission. ”Whatever they decide is good with us,” she said, adding, “We didn’t realize this was going to turn into such a controversial topic.”

A spokesperson for Councilmember David Oh, the other official of Korean descent on Council, said Oh had taken no position on the statue. “He does believe it has to come through the process to determine whether the community is in support of this,” the aide said Friday.

Last year, the Art Commission, in a preliminary vote, voted 6-0 to approve the statue in concept.

In a public hearing early this year, arts officials in the Kenney administration also spoke favorably of the statue. The Office of Arts, Culture and Creative Economy posted a question-and-answer document on its website, rebutting criticism of the monument. It was posted in five languages — English, Korean, Japanese, and traditional and simplified Chinese.

At the hearing, Marguerite Anglin, the architect and painter who is director of public art for the city, dismissed the idea that the statue ran afoul of the directive’s seeming focus on Philadelphia matters. She noted it was not far from memorials on Penn’s Landing honoring veterans of the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

The artwork, she said, “represents Asian communities which have a significant impact on Philadelphia but are not well represented in the city’s public art collection.”

Anglin added: “A work of art can have political themes. Public art can be controversial, but it can allow people to have a space for people to have conversation about difficult topics.”

Her boss, the mayor, is more cautious.

“It is clear that the Statue of Peace has elicited strong opinions and debate, as art often does,” a spokesperson for Kenney said last week. ”All of these opinions will be considered before the Art Commission and the mayor will not be lobbying either for or against the work before that body.”

In March, Arthur Gibbs, the commander of a Veterans of Foreign Wars post on Front Street, across the street from the proposed plaza, wrote the city in opposition to the statue. While saying “I’m not devaluing the issue,” Gibbs said he saw no particular reason Queen Village had been chosen as a site. Gibbs said he worried the monument might become a rallying spot for protests that could disturb some of his members.

In June, opponents of the statue gained another ally when leaders of the American Jewish Committee wrote the city to recommend against the monument.

“We don’t think the statue would take us in the direction of a spirit of reconciliation,” Marcia Bronstein, the AJC regional director, said last week in an interview. “We think it would be divisive and create strife.”

As an example of a differing approach, Bronstein said the American Jewish Committee had pushed immediately after WWII for steps to rebuild a leveled Germany, at a time when many Jewish groups wanted it shunned for its war crimes. She saw this as a reconciliatory move, not one sharpening divisions.

Bronstein said her group works with Asian leaders and has spoken out against hatred directed at Asian Americans.

Next month, the city’s Art Commission is expected to hold a hearing and then vote. No date has been set. The members, paid $40 per hearing, are to hold a special session on the statue.