THE POWER OF PUBLIC STATUES
comfort women sculptures from around the world
By Sophia Kwon
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| South Korean Statue |
There are a lot of stories that we never get to hear about, that get buried for social and political reasons. This is a shame, because learning from the past teaches us how to avoid mistakes. One story that not many people know about is that of the comfort women, also known as Ianfu.
Ianfu come from all over Asia, though Koreans accounted for a large portion of them, up to 80%. They were forcefully taken from their homes and used as sex slaves. After Japan colonized Korea, Korean women were in a particularly awful position. Due to strong patriarchal rule, they had no resources from which to protect themselves from the Japanese authorities. They were literally women with no recourse to the law or hope. In a complete cultural take over, the Japanese didn’t let them speak Korean and forced them to speak Japanese. Today, many people around my grandparent’s age are more fluent in Japanese than Korean.
Also, the Japanese used many aspects of Korean culture against itself. The authorities were afraid of sexually transmitted diseases and Korean culture’s emphasis on virginity served as a pretext for using mostly Korean women. It is a crazy excuse to use a country’s women as sex slaves and that’s why these stories are so important to get out—they tell us the truth and how sense has nothing to do with injustice. For many years, due to shame and negligence, the stories of comfort women were largely forgotten.
Statues are a powerful form of art that have a public and social dimension. I want to look at the number of comfort women statues around the world commemorating this sad moment in Korean history and see how and what they choose to emphasize. What’s fascinating is not that this type of display of public regret would happen and be shown in country after country—after all, there are holocaust memorials all over the world. What’s interesting is that every country has a different version of the statue and tells you not only about the history of comfort women, but also how that country thinks about these issues. So let’s take a look at the first and most important statue of them all: Korea speaking to Japan.
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| Located in front of the Japanese Embassy |
The Korean comfort women statue, located in front of the Japanese embassy, shows a young women sitting in a chair next to an empty chair. She seems to be a teenager, wearing a traditional Korean dress called a Hanbok. The girl’s hair is short. There was a Korean tradition that women had to have long hair. They believed that cutting it was disrespectful to their parents. But when the Japanese created the Ianfus they cut their hair without mercy. The empty chair represents the comfort women who have died before they had a chance to be memorialized. What’s beautiful about the statue, though, is that it is also for people to symbolically sit near the comfort women and give them comfort and kindness. So we see in Korea, the statue is all about recognition and healing.
After this statue of Comfort Women was erected in Korea, other countries started to build statues to memorialize and call attention to the plight of the comfort women. In 2015, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors issued a mandate to build and erect a statue in San Francisco’s Chinatown on Kearney Street. The statue is radically different than the one in Korea. There are three figures holding hands on a pedestal, representing girls from Korea, China, and the Philippines.
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| San Francisco Comfort Women Sculpture |
Beside them, there is an old women figure looking towards the cluster of girls, as if she protecting them, giving them respect, and more importantly, remembering them. Before this statue was put in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the Japanese government called Mayor Ed Lee to halt the project. Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura of Osaka threatened to end his city’s sisterhood with San Francisco unless Mayor Lee rejected the statue. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said it was “extremely regrettable” that San Francisco had gone ahead with this memorial.
The Philippine comfort women statue is on a major thoroughfare, Roxas Boulevard, where major Philippine ministries and the Japanese embassy in the Philippines is located. The statue that is built in the Philippine is different than the statue that I am familiar with in Korea. The two-meter-tall bronze sculpture depicts a woman wearing a scarf on her head with her eyes blindfolded. This statue is wearing a traditional Philippine dress called the Maria Clara. Unlike the statues in San Francisco and Korea, the Philippine comfort woman is an actual woman. Her eyes are covered, as if they are unable to express the sadness of being sex slaves.
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| Philippine Comfort Women Sculpture |
These statues all tell an important story and no matter the slight differences in emphasis and culture they serve as a reminder of the many social and political injustices people suffer. The comfort women statues are a reminder of the social and political dimensions of art and how public representation can demand that we never forget the many cruelties that the strong have inflicted on the weak.
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