This comfort Women memorial in Fort Lee’s Constitution Park was dedicated on May 23rd, 2018, by the Youth Council of Fort Lee, a student organization led by Korean-American high school students, who advocated for two years to create and fundraise the money to build it. The Youth Council goal was to “evoke memories of the Comfort Women and their strength, along with the strength that all other victims of war have displayed…. and serve as a beacon of hope for a better future avoiding these types of crimes against humanity on all fronts.”
The memorial, designed by Euwan Kim, features a young woman cut into a circular stone. The artist wanted to express the gap this memorial fills when bringing the Comfort Women’s stories back into history. On the memorial’s pedestal, the poem by Gabriella Son is inscribed.
Comfort Women is the name given to a hundred thousand Asian girls and women who were sex slaves during the second world war by the Japanese imperial army. They were abducted from their homes, kept in inhuman conditions, and suffered sexual violence daily. Most of these women did not survive to tell their stories, and those who did found the courage to testify only years later.
There are Comfort Women’s memorials all over the world. In New Jersey, there are three more – in Hackensack, Palisades Park, and Union City.
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