Comfort Women Memorial Statues

Comfort Women Memorial Statues: it is possible for these to be symbols of peace?
1. Introduction
This term paper focuses on the symbolic meaning of comfort women Memorial Statues around the world. Are these, or can these statues be someday, symbols of peace? To give answer to this question concerning the ongoing disputes and conflicts between Japan and other nations, I will hereinafter draw, for comparison with the comfort women case, the case of the Hiroshima A-bomb Cenotaph, which has been taken up in the June 20 lecture, and the case of the Nazi Holocaust memorials.

2. The purpose of war memorials
A memorial monument in general is defined as “a general term of building which is publicly established in order that a particular person or

The case of the comfort women statues
Comfort women Statues are a family of statues settled across the world commemorating the comfort women, who are believed to be coerced by the Imperial Japanese Army to engage in the sexual service for the troops. A recent case is Glendale, California, the case that made a wide dispute over the Internet society.
What is to be noted is that almost all of the epitaphs of statues contain two types of tokens: “peace” and “Japan Army”. For example, the epitaph of the Glendale statue reads as follows:
Peace Monument
In memory of more than 200,000 Asian and Dutch women who were removed from their homes in Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, East Timor and Indonesia, to be coerced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Armed Forces of Japan between 1932 and 1945.
And in celebration of proclamation of “Comfort Women Day”by the City of Glendale on July 30, 2012, and of passing of House Resolution 121 by the United States Congress on July 30, 2007, urging the Japanese Government to accept historical responsibility for these crimes.
It is our sincere hope that these unconscionable violations of human rights shall never recur.
July 30, 2013
(Reprinted from Wikipedia, underlined by

Conclusion
As seen above, the Comfort Women statues have still a long way to go to become symbols of peace in spite of their self-reference as “peace” symbols. However, it is still possible, I believe, for them to be.
Compared to the Hiroshima Cenotaph, the Comfort Women statues do not lack the universal evaluation in terms of the urgency for humanity (c). However, the problem of (b), namely the problem of forgiveness, has not yet been over. Since the post war clean up has not been completely done, as we saw in Section 4, even ordinary Japanese tend to refuse to admit the responsibility in fear of the infinite blame being put upon eternally (for the detailed mechanism see Takahashi 2001: 1-20) and the Korean people are still unwilling to extinguish their anger.
The victims that have still not been satisfied with the compensation from Japan are whom we should sympathize with. It is also understandable that the Korean activists are furious with the way the Japanese Government has undertook the responsibility. However, without concrete recognition and broad agreement on women’s right shared by both Japan and other countries, and the overcoming with the tu quoque problem, the settlement will ended up in making the matter