Singapore may get a statue for sex slaves

Singapore is expected to be the first Asian country after Korea to erect a monument to Korean women forced into sexual slavery by Japanese troops during World War II, a Seoul civic group said yesterday.

The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery said it is pushing forward with setting up another “Peace Monument” in the Southeast Asian country.

The monument is a bronze statue of a young girl that symbolizes the Korean victims, who are euphemistically called “comfort women.”

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 decades ago, 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 the 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, a victim of Japan’s sexual enslavement, the group said. Kim was taken by Japan at the age of 15 and forced into sexual slavery in Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia.

Japan, which colonized the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945, has refused to issue an apology or compensate the victims officially. Yonhap