WW II Comfort Women Monument

The Women's Column of Strength stands in Saint Mary's Square as a bronze memorial to the hundreds of thousands of women and girls subjected to sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War. Designed by sculptor Steven Whyte and unveiled in 2017, the monument depicts three teenagers from China, Korea, and the Philippines standing in a circle and holding hands, their expressions defiant. At their feet, a separate bronze figure of an elderly woman gazes up at them, representing Kim Hak-sun, the first survivor to break the silence and testify publicly about her experiences in 1991. This memorial became a flashpoint for international diplomacy shortly after its installation. The city of Osaka, Japan, which had maintained a sister-city relationship with San Francisco for sixty years, formally severed those ties in protest of the monument. Proponents of the statue view this reaction as an attempt to suppress historical truth, while the memorial itself serves as a permanent site for public education about wartime human rights abuses and the ongoing global struggle against sexual violence.