'Comfort women' statue set up for 1st time in Italy

ROME -- A girl statue symbolizing the victims of Japan's wartime sexual slavery, euphemistically called "comfort women," has been erected in Italy for the first time, a local activist group said Sunday.

The statue, dubbed a Statue of Peace or comfort women statue, was disclosed to the public on Stintino Beach of the Sardinia island Saturday, according to the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery.

The Stintino statue was the second such girl statue installed on public land in Europe after the first one set up in Berlin, Germany, in 2020, the council said. It also marked the 14th statue erected overseas after the first one installed in Glendale, California, in 2013.

The statue's location is on a beach about 200 meters from Stintino's city hall, the group said, adding the area is visited by many tourists.

The council said it proposed the construction of the statue to the Italian city in December last year, and the mayor immediately welcomed the proposal.

The girl statue represents the need to promote universal human rights of women, Stintino Mayor Rita Vallebella was quoted by the council as saying at a ceremony to unveil the statue.

The statue symbolizes 200,000 Asian women, mostly Koreans, who were forcibly sent to front-line brothels to work as sex slaves for Japanese troops during World War II. The sexual slavery victims are one of the many thorny issues stemming from the 1910-45 period, when Korea was a Japanese colony.

The epitaph set up next to the Stintino statue states that the Japanese Imperial Army forcibly took away many young girls and women to make them provide sexual services to their soldiers during the war and it is meant to highlight the significance of the statue as a symbol for remembering the victims.

The inscription is engraved in Italian, Korean and English, with QR codes provided alongside for access to other languages, the council said.

L'unione Sarda, a local media outlet, reported that Japan's top envoy to Italy, Suzuki Satoshi, had requested Mayor Vallebella postpone the unveiling ceremony, claiming that the inscription is far from the facts.

Japan's Kyodo News earlier reported that Vallebella said her city is considering replacing the inscription so that it will reflect both stances of South Korea and Japan on the sexual slavery issue.

But Lee Na-young, head of the civic group, dismissed the report, saying that Vallebella told her that the mayor had not mentioned the possibility of replacing the inscription when meeting with Japan's envoy and that her city has no plan to change it. (Yonhap)