"Comfort Women" Monument Dedication Ceremony
(Union City, NJ) The City of Union City, Mayor Brian P. Stack and Board of Commissioners will be holding a Dedication Ceremony for the City's "Comfort Women" Monument on Monday, August 4, 2014 at 12:00 PM at Liberty Plaza, 30th Street and Palisade Avenue.
Attending the event will be Mayor & State Senator Brian P. Stack and the Board of Commissioners; City Historian, Gerard Karabin; City Art Curator, Amado Mora; Artistic Director of the Union City Philharmonic Orchestra, Jahye Kim; Artistic Director of West Hudson Opera, John Jay Hebert; Artistic Director of The Grace Theatre Workshop, Megan Fernandez; guest speaker from Women Rising; and several other dignitaries. Very special guests will be Ok-Sun Lee and Il-Chul Kang, two ladies who survived this horrific time in history and who are flying from Korea for the ceremony.
The event will feature a haunted poetry reading by Cat J. Lane from the cast of the play "Comfort" currently playing in NYC, as well as a performance by twelve-year old Subin Lee playing "Smetana-Moldau" on the harp.
Art Installation: "Our Cry"
Surrounding Liberty Plaza, there will be a memorable and thought-provoking art installation "Our Cry" by the Union City Artist Collective featuring artists Amado Mora (Ecuador), Alma Peralta (Puerto Rico), Ines Berges (Dominican Republic), Juan Ramiro Torres (Peru), Ruth Alvarado (Costa Rica), Abby Levine (USA), Craig Radhuber (USA), Obdulio Romero Sabino (Dominican Republic), Sigfrido Duarte (Dominican Republic) Jhon Vargas (Ecuador), and Lucio Fernandez. The is the brainchild and being curated by artist and Union City Commissioner, Lucio Fernandez.
"Comfort Women" Monument Dedication Ceremony
Monday, August 4, 2014
12:00 PM
Liberty Plaza
30th Street & Palisade Avenue
Union City, NJ
FREE Admission
Everyone invited.
122 Korean women claimed that "we were the U.S. military comfort women", and sued the class action lawsuit on June 25, 2014.
ReplyDeletehttp://iamkoream.com/comfort-women-for-u-s-military-sue-south-korean-government/
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-07-11/news/sns-rt-us-southkorea-usa-military-20140711_1_u-s-forces-u-s-troops-human-trafficking
If the issue is not a diplomatic one about history, but a human rights concern for the future of all nations, the memorial in the park should be used for commemorating Korean comfort women enslaved for US military too. I hope Union City is not a hypocrite. The USA Army and the Korean Government itself are deeply committed to this Korean "comfort women" matter as an assailant of violence against women. The monument in the park should engrave the phrase on the statue " We were the U.S. military sex slave too" to remembert that all comfort women were the victims of human trafficking.
I am very confused because I found the following news.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/08/05/national/politics-diplomacy/asahi-shimbun-admits-errors-in-past-comfort-women-stories/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=asahi-shimbun-admits-errors-in-past-comfort-women-stories
It says that on August 6, 2014, the Asahi Shimbun, pro-Korean and liberal news paper in Japan, like New York Times, admitted to serious errors in many articles on the “comfort women” issue, retracting all stories going back decades that quoted a Japanese man who claimed he kidnapped about 200 Korean women and forced them to work at wartime Japanese military brothels. It means that as far as the present-day Korean Peninsula is concerned, the Asahi maintained that no hard evidence had been found to show the Japanese military was directly involved in recruiting women to the brothel system against their will.
Are this memorial based NOT on historical facts, but on political propaganda to bully Japan and the Japanese?
Anyway, the purpose of this memorial is for human rights of women. Union City should not be hypocrite, and should not turn their face away from the inconvenient truth, Korean comfort women enslaved by the US military 60 years ago. The Monument should engrave the phrase "We were the U.S. military sex slave," for human rights of women, the very purpose of this memorial. Union City has many things to do before criticizing the other country’s past 70 years ago.