Singapore is expected to be the first Asian country other than South Korea to have a monument built for Korean women forced into sexual slavery by Japanese troops during World War II, a Seoul civic group said Wednesday.
The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery said it is pushing forward with setting up another “Peace Monument,” which would be a bronze statue of a young girl that symbolizes the Korean victims, euphemistically called “comfort women,” in the Southeast Asian country.
The move is part of the group’s so-called “butterfly project” to erect similar monuments in places throughout Asia where young Korean victims were taken to service the Japanese military, the civic group said.
The first statue was built in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul in 2011 by victims and their supporters to mark their 1,000th weekly rally outside of the embassy in protest of Japan’s wartime atrocities.
The monument in Singapore will be erected based on the testimony of Kim Bok-dong, another surviving victim of Japan’s sexual enslavement, the group said. Kim was forcibly taken by Japan at the age of 15 and was pushed into slavery in Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia.
Japan, which colonized the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945, has acknowledged that its wartime military used sex slaves.
However, Tokyo refuses to issue an apology or compensate the victims individually, arguing that the issue was settled by a 1965 treaty that normalized relations between the two countries. (Yonhap News)
