By Nestor CASTIGLIONE

On March 27, the Supreme Court declined to hear a lawsuit that was filed against Glendale over the erection of the “comfort women” statue in Central Park. The lawsuit was filed by Glendale resident Michiko Shiota Gingery and the Global Alliance for Historical Truth (GAHT), a non-profit group that disputes recognition of comfort women as sex slaves. The plaintiffs argued that the statue infringed on the federal government’s ability to conduct foreign affairs and violated the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. A ruling last year by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, finding in favor of the city.

Several other statues, which feature a young Korean girl seated on a chair in a traditional chima cheogori dress, have gone up in the U.S. and Australia.

A statement by City Atty. Michael J. Garcia read, “The City Attorney’s Office and the attorneys from Sidley Austin LLP, the firm [that] provided pro bono legal services to assist the City’s litigation efforts, always believed that this lawsuit was without merit. We are pleased that the Court recognized our City Council’s right to make public pronouncements on matters important to our community.”

The issue of comfort women (a translation of the Japanese euphemism ianfu) has been an especially bitter one between Japan and South Korea.

Japan in 2015 issued a second formal apology for its former military’s use of comfort women. The agreement reached between both nations, which both countries described as “final and irreversible,” came with monetary compensation from the Japanese government and a letter of apology from Prime Minister Shinzō Abe to each surviving comfort woman.

Nonetheless, the apology was met with wide criticism in South Korea. Moon Jae-in, the current frontrunner in the special election to succeed deposed former president Park Gyeung-hye, has declared the agreement “null and void.”

According to Hiroaki Sato – a columnist for The Japan Times and a translator whose work has been published by New Directions and NYRB – the diplomatic battle over the comfort women statues has been inflamed by nationalism in both countries. While opining that the Japanese government should cease complaining about the statues, he also said that the statues simplify and misrepresent the matter. Sato added that the enmity between both countries goes back centuries, before the rise of modern Japan following the Meiji Restoration.

“Historically, Korea disdained Japan as a backward country, so its resentment of Japan has been doubled and tripled by having been trampled upon by [what it considered to be] a second-rate country in the 16th century [by Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasions] and then by having been annexed [and] colonized in the 20th century,” he said in an interview last week.

He continued, saying that while comfort women did indeed exist, the context in which they operated is not as clear-cut as has been presented.

Recent research by Korean historians Park Yu-ha and An Byeong-jik has presented a more ambiguous picture in which Koreans themselves were complicit in the comfort woman system. They also argue that many of the statistics published by the Korean government have been exaggerated.

“In her big volume [‘Comfort Women of the Empire’], Park Yu-ha points out at least two main problems about erecting statues overseas and in Korea: The act tries to show Korea’s moral superiority, which is false; and that the statues misrepresent the [age of the] actual Korean [comfort women as] their average age was in the mid-20s, not the teens.”

Korean scholar Park was recently tried in criminal court for defamation. On Jan. 25 she was acquitted.

A number listed for GAHT was disconnected. Inquiries seeking comment from members of the City Council who had voted in favor of the statue were referred to the prepared statement by City Atty. Garcia.

  Nestor CASTIGLIONE