‘Comfort women’ statue missing in the Philippines as Japan’s wartime legacy under focus
- The monument was dismantled by Rodrigo Duterte’s government before a 2018 ADB summit to avoid antagonising Japan, and later ‘stolen’ from the sculptor
- Despite Harvard professor Mark Ramseyer arguing they were paid prostitutes, archives show Japan’s military establishment forced Filipino women to become sex slaves
President Rodrigo Duterte said the next day that while the monument was “freedom of expression … it is not the policy of government to antagonise other nations” and it should therefore be placed elsewhere.
“It was removed from Roxas Boulevard [beside Manila Bay] by pressure from Japan, directly to Duterte,” said Teresita Ang-See, co-founding director of Kaisa, an ethnic Chinese NGO which led the memorial project.
The statue depicting a blindfolded woman wearing a traditional gown was returned to its sculptor Jonas Roces for repair and storage while the project funders looked for another location. But once they had found and landscaped the new setting, the artist “ghosted” the NGO.
“When he was finally traced, he said it was stolen from his studio,” Ang-See told This Week in Asia. But he could not produce any police report “and it weighs a tonne, it can’t just be stolen”.