City Councilman Peter Koo, the Queens Republican-turned-Democrat, may be starting an international incident. He is considering whether to create a memorial to honor Asian "comfort women"—a touchy topic for the Japanese.
According to the Daily News, the Korean-American community made the request to rename a street as well as install a plaque or memorial in Flushing to honor them: "Scholars say up to 200,000 girls and young women were kidnapped or lured from Korea, China and other occupied lands to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese Army during World War II." However, after Korea Daily reported about the possibility, Koo and other City Council members (Dan Halloran and Mark Weprin), started to receive outrage missives from Japan. One claimed, "The term ‘comfort women’ refers simply to prostitutes in wartime. But Koreans have long been promoting a false version of history," and accused Koo of trying to win over Korean-American voters.
Koo told the News, "This is not anti-Japanese. A lot of people suffered. A lot of Japanese suffered." Supporters of the proposal think it's important to act quickly, because many of the comfort women are now in their 80s. The Japanese government denied it was associated with the letter writing campaign, the Japanese Consulate General's office telling the News that it "recognizes the issue, officially extended apologies [in 1993] and assisted the Asian Women Fund [in 1995] hoping strongly to enhance understanding and promote the ties and friendship."
However, four Japanese legislators disputed a NJ town's memorial for comfort women, claiming that the numbers were exaggerated and that the women willing had sex with soldiers. Palisades Park mayor James Rotundo also told the Daily Record that Ambassador Shigeyuke Hiroki said the Japanese government was "interested in funding local youth programs, donating books on Japanese culture to the library and planting Japanese cherry blossoms in the town — if the monument were removed."
Last year, Dutch journalist Hilde Janssen and photographer Jan Banning made a documentary project about comfort women. NPR described one of the victims, "Niyem, who, at 10 years old was kidnapped and loaded into a truck full of other women destined for a military camp in West Java. She shared a small tent with two other girls, where soldiers openly raped them. 'I was still so young,' she is quoted by Janssen as saying. 'Within two months my body was completely destroyed. I was nothing but a toy, as a human being I meant nothing, that's how it felt during the Japanese era... I didn't dare tell anyone that I had been raped, I didn't want to hurt my parents. I was afraid that no one would want me, that I would be left out. But people still abused me by calling me a 'Japanese hand-me-down.' Because I had been gone so long, they suspected what had happened. It hurt me tremendously.'"
