hankyoreh

By Kwon Tae-ho and Jeong Nam-ku, Washington and Tokyo correspondents

Tokyo is hard at work trying to get a New Jersey monument to comfort women taken down.

Hiroki Shigeyuki, Japan’s general consul in New York, met with Palisades Park mayor James Rotundo on May 1 to offer gifts in exchange for having a monument to comfort women removed, Japan’s Kyodo News Agency reported on May 22.

The news service quoted Korean-American deputy mayor Jason Kim, who was present at the meeting between Rotundo and Hiroki, as saying the general consul offered to donate cherry trees and books in exchange for the monument‘s removal.

While making the request, Hiroki reportedly acknowledged the Japanese military’s involvement in drafting women to serve as sexual slaves during World War II. He also referenced a 1993 statement of “apology and reflection” by then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei.

However, Rotundo rejected the proposal, saying the goal of the monument was to alert future generations to the horrors of war, not to criticize Japan, Kyodo reported.

But on May 6, four Liberal Democratic Party members of the Japanese House of Representatives visited the Palisades Park City Hall to make their own demands for the monument’s removal. In the process, they argued that comfort women were managed by private businesses without government involvement, that Korean women participated voluntarily, and that the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, a prominent group working for the comfort women, has ties to Pyongyang.

Rotundo once again dismissed the demands, stating that the monument was erected by US taxpayers rather than Koreans and that the city council checked the historical accuracy before putting it up.

More demands could be made by Japan to the US government and Congress in the future.

Korean American Voters’ Council (KAVC) director Kim Dong-suk, who spearheaded the effort to erect the monument, said Japan’s aim is to turn the statue’s removal into a bone of contention between Koreans and Japanese in the United States.

Kim added that the move also seemed to be a kind of diplomatic response to recent Korean-American calls to have the body of water east of the Korean Peninsula listed on maps as the “East Sea” as well as the “Sea of Japan.”

Korean-American groups responded vehemently to news of Japan’s demands, making plans to put up comfort women memorials in 22 regions of the US with large Korean populations, talking with city authorities about building the country’s first road to commemorate the comfort women in Flushing’s Koreatown, and pushing for the issuance of a commemorative stamp.

The Palisades Park memorial was made with a site and stone donated by the city to KAVC after the July 2007 passage of a US House of Representatives resolution on the comfort women issue. It was erected in 2010, with additional support from overseas Koreans.

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