Brookhaven Erects 'Comfort Women' Monument

BROOKHAVEN, GA -- Brookhaven officials on Friday erected a monument that draws attention to one of the ugliest chapters of colonial rule in the Pacific. As rain poured down on a crowd in attendance, the Young Girl's Statue for Peace was unveiled at Brookhaven's Blackburn II Park at 3509 Blair Circle.

The public was invited to the 10 a.m. unveiling of the monument. Brookhaven officials have long championed issues surrounding the scourge of human trafficking, holding police workshops on the issue among other endeavors. (To get notified of more local news like this, click here to sign up for the BrookhavenPatch. Or find your Atlanta-area town here. Or, if you have an iPhone, download the free Patch app.)

Since the city announced that it would erect the memorial, activists, many of them Japanese, have emailed Brookhaven officials to express their displeasure with the monument, saying that the issue is much more complicated than a building a landmark.

State Rep. Tom Taylor of Dunwoody has also voiced opposition to the monument, saying in an interview with Intown Atlanta said, “This is a small group of Korean-American activists pushing this [memorial] all across Georgia and finally got a city to take the bait.”

This writer has received scores of emails on the issue, with this being the basic sentiment: "The government of Japan officially denies above at UN human rights committees, stating “the figure ‘200,000 persons’ as the number of comfort women also lacks concrete evidence”, “the expression ‘sex slaves’ contradicts the facts” and “there are one-sided claims which lack any corroborative evidence in the reports by the United Nations Special Rapporteurs as well as in the criticisms and recommendations from treaty bodies.”

From 1910 to 1945, the systematic raping of South Korean women by Japanese soldiers in wartime brothels was commonplace, representing the longest and most painful saga of sex trafficking in modern times.
The plight of the former sex slaves, dubbed "Comfort Women" by the soldiers back then, has been a point of contention between Japan and South Korea for decades as a dwindling number of the women (a little more than three dozen are still alive) continue to agitate the Japanese government for appropriate recognition and reparations.
In a unanimous vote, the Brookhaven City Council approved plans to build a memorial for the "Comfort Women" to raise awareness of the injustice and depravity of the global human sex trade. Brookhaven's statue, named Young Girl’s Statue for Peace, will show that the city, a quarter of whose residents are foreign-born, is in solidarity with the women and against sex trafficking across the world.

Brookhaven's commemoration of the Comfort Women monument wa at Blackburn II Park, 3509 Blair Circle, Brookhaven.

Image via Wikimedia / Public Domain