Now 89, former World War II “comfort woman” Lee Yong-soo on Friday clutched a microphone in one hand in a park outside San Francisco’s Chinatown, thrust her other clinched fist in the air and made a vow.
Lee, abducted from her Korean homeland at 15 and forced to work in brothels servicing Japanese soldiers, was speaking at the dedication of the latest of dozens of statues put up around the world commemorating the ordeal of thousands of women like her in territory held by the Japanese army before and during World War II.
Japan has not gone far enough in apologizing, and the statues memorializing those the Japanese army called “comfort women” for their soldiers will keep going up, Lee, her frame bent in traditional green and pink Korean robes, told the scores at Friday’s unveiling ceremony.
Photo: AP
“And at the end, we will have a memorial in Tokyo. So they can say: ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ when they pass by,” said Lee, who traveled from South Korea for Friday’s ceremony, as she has for at least four other such dedications in the US alone.
Historians have said tens of thousands of women, and perhaps hundreds of thousands, were seized in Asian territories under Japanese military control and made to work in military brothels.
The issue has remained an open rift between Japan and other Asian nations. Surviving comfort women and their supporters rejected a 2015 statement from Japan expressing “apologies and remorse,” saying it did not go far enough in acknowledging what say was the Japanese government’s responsibility.
“If Japan does not like” the continued focus on comfort women, Lee told the crowd through a translator, “Japan must apologize.”
On Friday, the South Korean and Japanese foreign ministers, meeting in New York, agreed to work together to resolve their countries’ lingering differences over the episode, Japan’s Kyodo News reported.
“What these grandmas did was change the way the world looked at sex trafficking,” said retired San Francisco judge Lillian Sing, who was a leader in the effort by California’s Korean, Chinese and Philippine communities to commission and put up the statue.
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