Japanese mayor says he’ll end SF sister city status over comfort women statue

A San Francisco crowd admires the “Women’s Column of Strength” at its unveiling in Sep tember. The sculpture honors “comfort women” enslaved by Japanese forces in World War II. A San Francisco crowd admires the “Women’s Column of Strength” at its unveiling in Sep tember. The sculpture honors “comfort women” enslaved by Japanese forces in World War II. Photo: Eric Risberg, Associated Press Photo: Eric Risberg, Associated Press Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Japanese mayor says he’ll end SF sister city status over comfort women statue 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

The mayor of Osaka, Japan, is making good on his threat to sever the sister-city relationship with San Francisco because of a Chinatown memorial honoring women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military before and during World War II.

The bronze sculpture that was placed in St. Mary’s Square in September shows three teenage girls holding hands next to an older woman. Though the artwork, known as the “Women’s Column of Strength,” was erected to honor female war victims, it’s seen by many Japanese citizens and government officials as an insult.

“This is highly regrettable,” Osaka Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura told reporters in Japan on Thursday. “The relationship of trust has completely been destroyed.”

Yoshimura made his comments after San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee signed a resolution Wednesday accepting the transfer of the statue onto city property. Yoshimura said he will cut ties with San Francisco by the end of the year.

Lee had sent a letter to Yoshimura on Oct. 2, saying he was “deeply disappointed,” after the Osaka mayor first threatened to end the sister-city relationship in response to the memorial.

The sculpture was the vision of two retired San Francisco Superior Court judges, Lillian Sing and Julie Tang, who wanted to memorialize the estimated 200,000 women from Asian-Pacific countries, known as “comfort women,” forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces from 1931 until the war ended in 1945.

It was the first sculpture to honor comfort women in a major American city and comes as historians gain a broader understanding of the atrocities perpetrated during the war. There are dozens of such statues in South Korea and a handful in small cities around the United States.

Tang said she was “outraged” after hearing Yoshimura’s comments.

“I think its a shame,” she said Friday. “They’re turning history on its head. Yoshimura is turning this into a geopolitical issue. It’s not. It’s a human rights issue. This is a global women’s issue to fight against sexual violence and using women as sex objects as a strategy of war.”

Many Japanese officials said they have apologized to former comfort women and feel their country is being unfairly singled out.

“The difficulty of this issue lies in the fact that there are wildly conflicting views, even today, as to what actually happened,” Jun Yamada, consul general of Japan in San Francisco, wrote in an opinion piece published on The Chronicle’s opinion page Sept 21, the day the statue was unveiled.

“Unfortunately, the aim of current comfort women memorial movements seems to perpetrate and fixate on certain one-sided interpretations, without presenting credible evidence, in the form of physical statues,” Yamada added.

Tang said that as more light is shed on comfort women, Japan is pushing back with a revisionist history.

“Yoshimura is doing this to play to his constituents in Osaka — especially the right-wing factions,” she said. “He’s continuing a policy of denial at the expense of the truth and history of the comfort women survivors.”

One such survivor, 89-year-old Yong-soo Lee, attended the memorial’s unveiling in front of a crowd of hundreds. She was kidnapped at age 15 from her home in Korea during the Japanese occupation and was forced to work in a brothel in Taiwan that served Japanese soldiers.

She and other survivors continue to demand further apologies and reparations from the Japanese government.

Osaka — Japan’s third-largest city — was the first of San Francisco’s 18 sister cities, which also include Barcelona, Paris, Shanghai and Seoul. The relationships began under President Dwight Eisenhower as a way to promote peace and economic prosperity between cities around the world. San Francisco and Osaka have been sister cities since 1957.

Kathleen Kimura, co-chairwoman of the San Francisco-Osaka Sister City Association, was part of a delegation to visit Japan last month. Her group met with Osaka’s mayor and knew he was considering severing the relationship, but avoided bringing it up.

“It’s too bad politics has interfered with the relationship between San Francisco and Osaka,” Kimura said. “The issue with the statue has caused a lot of hurt in Japan. A lot of the people are hurt that it is being put there now — 75 years after the war.”

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky