Statue Wars Reveal Contested History of Japan’s ‘Comfort Women’

On December 30 2016, a South Korean civic group placed a bronze statue of a girl in front of the Japanese consulate in the southern port city of Busan. It commemorates as many as 200,000 enslaved military prostitutes, known as “comfort women”, from Korea and other parts of East Asia under Japanese domination during the second world war. In response, Japan recalled its ambassador.