The text of a monument to 'comfort women' -- women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.
HACKENSACK — Officials unveiled a new monument to the victims of WWII-era sexual slavery on Friday — a gesture that's drawn praise from New Jersey's Korean community and the ire of a vocal group of Japanese citizens who dispute its historical accuracy.
The monument pays tribute to 'comfort women' — women, coming from many countries but many of them Korean, who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II.
Its dedication coincided with International Women's Day, and was a major event for many in Bergen County's burgeoning Korean-American community, which now represents some 20 percent of the population. It was well-covered by local and international Asian media outlets.
"I'm very proud of Bergen County and its residents for their hard work and passion towards human rights," said Dongchan Kim, a member of the Comfort Women Memorial Committee, which raised funds to build the memorial.
Freeholder John Mitchell, who worked with local Korean groups to get approval for the monument, called it "a milestone in fighting against the ever-increasing activity of sex-trafficking, and another important bridge that solidifies the relationship between the American and Korean peoples."
The effort to erect the memorial, a humble plaque affixed to a stone on the courthouse lawn, has not come without controversy, though. The issue of comfort women has been a point of contention between the Korean and Japanese governments in the past, and boiled over into local efforts to memorialize them.
Opponents of the monument have been inundating media outlets and local officials with letters and e-mails in recent weeks, disputing the veracity of the story of comfort women, claiming that they were actually prostitutes who willingly exchanged money for sex during the war.
Korean-American veterans stand in front of the comfort women memorial after its dedication on Friday, March 8, 2013.
That campaign was briefly acknowledged at Friday's ceremony.
"We certainly received correspondence from a number of people on the topic," David Ganz, the chairman of the Bergen County freeholder board, said Friday. "I say to you, simply, that when you ignore history you are condemned to repeat it, and this something that can never be repeated."
This is not the first time the issue has bubbled up in Bergen County: Last year, two separate delegations of Japanese officials visited Palisades Park, a Korean American enclave in the county, to ask officials to remove a similar memorial erected outside the borough's library. They declined, and later that year, the monument was defaced with white wooden stakes — an act local Korean groups say was carried out by the Japanese right-wing extremist group Suzuki Nobuyuki.
In November, a Japanese group took out a full-page ad in The Star-Ledger responding to coverage of the county's plans to erect the comfort women memorial, calling the story of comfort women a farce. To this day, the debate rages in the comment sections of news stories about the memorials, and on YouTube videos created by activists disputing the historical record.
But a 2007 resolution co-sponsored by U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell and passed by Congress formally recognized the sexual enslavement of women during World War II and called on the Japanese government to apologize. Bergen County's monument now sits alongside similar memorials recognizing the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, American slavery and the Irish Great Hunger.
"Every country needs to change something," Pascrell said Friday. "Only God is perfect. So that's what we need and that's what we're here for."
Chejin Park, a staff attorney for the group Korean American Civic Empowerment, told NJ.com earlier this year that recognizing the sexual enslavement of women during the war is hardly controversial, and that the opposition comes from a vocal minority of far-right Japanese conservatives.
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"They have a loud voice, but they are not representing the Japanese citizens," he said. "Only they are saying it's controversial. It's not. It's a simple historical fact."
Bergen County Executive Kathleen Donovan, who traveled to South Korea late last year, told NJ.com after the trip that she'd visited a home for surviving comfort women, many of them in their 70s and 80s.
"They had been through such unspeakable — I mean, some of them were raped 30 or 40 times a day, day after day for months," she said. "But they were wonderful people, warm and happy. And they want their story told."