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FORT LEE
Fort Lee, NJ

Fort Lee to revisit 'comfort women' memorial

FORT LEE — The Youth Council of Fort Lee, a group of high school activists, has approached the borough with a proposal to install a 5-foot-tall disk-shaped tribute to the thousands of enslaved women, mostly of Korean descent, at Constitution Park and hopes to receive approval for the project next month.  

On a visit from Korea, former comfort women Ok-seon Yi, left, and Yongsoo Lee stand near the memorial to comfort women outside the Palisades Park library in 2011.

The memorial would honor women who were forced to serve in Japanese military brothels, called "comfort stations," during World War II.

“We thought it was a big issue that hadn’t been adequately addressed,” said Joseph Hong, president of the youth council. “It’s about women’s rights and human rights… and it’s something that’s important for people to know about.” 

The group held a contest for the design of the memorial last year, settling on a silhouette of a girl in traditional Korean dress standing with arms spread in front of a Korean flag. The Borough Council is expected to discuss the monument on Sept. 7.

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Euwan Kim, the student artist who designed the monument, said she wanted to convey the shocking, profound impact Japan’s invasion of Korea had on the country as a whole. 

Another student, Gabriella Son, wrote a poem, “Stories My Grandmother Tells Me,” from the perspective of a grandchild of a "comfort woman" that will appear at the memorial’s pedestal. 

The proposed design of a memorial for comfort women, the hundreds of thousands of women and girls, many of Korean descent, who served in Japanese military brothels, or "comfort stations," during World War II.

Fort Lee last considered installing a monument to the women in 2013, when the borough’s Korean American Vietnam War veterans group approached the council with a design depicting an image of a Korean woman with the Japanese imperial flag in the background. 

The proposal received swift backlash from other Korean-American groups in the greater New York area, who offered their own ideas and bickered over the tone of the imagery and wording of the inscription.

The infighting led to an impasse that showed no signs of breaking – until now. 

A number of Korean-American and veterans organizations, including the Korean American Vietnam War Veterans, the Korean American Association of Fort Lee, two Korean senior associations and the Korean American Brotherhood in Law Enforcement, enthusiastically endorsed the teenagers’ proposal in a letter sent to the borough government in June.

“We commend them for their hard work and effort on this particular issue of great significance to our community and respectfully urge you to approve and adopt their proposal in a formal resolution,” the letter states. 

The first memorial to comfort women in North Jersey and the United States was placed in Palisades Park in 2010. Other memorials in Bergen County soon followed. 

A memorial to the comfort women was placed at the Bergen County Courthouse among four monuments to international atrocities that affect immigrant communities. The monuments mark black slavery in the United States, the Irish Famine, the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust.

A Japanese delegation traveled in 2012 to Palisades Park, where more than half the community is of Korean descent, to ask for the monument's removal. The issue of Imperial Japan's enslavement of women during the Second World War has been a long contention between those two countries. In late 2015, Japan agreed to make a formal apology and appropriated $8 million to a fund to pay for the health care of the remaining comfort women. 

The youth council is raising $45,000 to build the comfort women memorial in Fort Lee, said Hong. 

Mayor Mark Sokolich said the borough will assist with installation if the project is approved and will offer its full support. He praised the youth council for managing to build a consensus that for years appeared indefinitely out of reach. 

“Who better to come up with a plan for this than young Korean-Americans in Fort Lee,” he said. 

Email: shkolnikova@northjersey.com  

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