Brookhaven To Erect 'Comfort Women' Monument On June 30

BROOKHAVEN, GA -- Brookhaven officials announced Thursday that a monument that draws attention to one of the ugliest chapters of colonial rule in the Pacific will be erected in Brookhaven on Friday, June 30.

The public is invited to the unveiling of the monument, which is a memorial for the Comfort Women of World War II, named Young Girl’s Statue for Peace. Brookhaven officials have long championed issues surrounding the scourge of human trafficking, holding police workshops on the issue among other endeavors. SIGN UP: To get notified of more local news like this, click here to sign up for the Brookhaven Patch. 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.

Brookhaven Monument To Memorialize 'Comfort Women'

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 begins at 10 a.m. at Blackburn II Park, 3509 Blair Circle, Brookhaven.

Image via Wikimedia / Public Domain