A plan to install a statue in an Auckland park to honour tens of thousands of women coerced into sexual slavery before and during WWII has been halted by a local board.
The proposal was to site the "comfort women" statue in the Korean Cultural Garden at Barry’s Point Reserve in Auckland’s Takapuna.
It depicted a seated girl next to an empty chair, resembling the Statue of Peace originally designed by Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung and sited to face the Japanese Embassy in South Korea’s Seoul in 2011.
It commemorated women, mostly from Korea but also from many other countries including China and the Philippines, who were forced to have sex with members of the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces in frontline makeshift brothels – between 10 and 30 times a day according to historians.
Estimates on the number of comfort women varied between 20,000 and 200,000.
Many died or suffered severe trauma from their brutal mistreatment.
Yesterday, the Devonport-Takapuna local board voted 4-2 to deny the landowner approval application from the Korean Garden Trust.
The motion to deny, moved by board chairperson Trish Deans and seconded by deputy chairperson Scott MacArthur, was based on the results of public consultation which “demonstrated a lack of community support for the proposal”.
Deans, MacArthur, Terence Harpur, and Garth Ellingham voted in the affirmative.
There were 672 submissions when Auckland Council provided a three-week window for feedback in January, with 57% opposed and 43% in favour. Of those, 36% and 34% of responses came from the Japanese and South Korean communities respectively.
Submitters in favour were broadly in line with the proposal, which said the statue would “honour the courage and resilience of survivors, promote peace and remembrance and support human rights education.”
Japanese Ambassador to New Zealand Makoto Osawa was one of those strongly opposed, on behalf of the Japanese Embassy.
He said he was worried the statue’s installation would cause division between New Zealand’s Japanese and Korean communities, and damage New Zealand-Japan diplomatic relations.
Similar statue installations around the world have been criticised by the Japanese government in the past.
Earlier in the month, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade acknowledged the sensitivity of the issue but said statues and monuments in public spaces were "a matter for local government and communities".
Gavin Busch and George Wood were the two who moved against the motion.
Wood was the first to voice his opposition. He said the board shouldn’t be basing its decision purely on negative public feedback.
“On balance, there were a lot of people that supported this going in, and we're saying that a lot of people didn't support it.”
Busch said, initially, he had agreed the statue was contentious, divisive, and a matter for Japan and Korea, not New Zealand.
However, he said attending the Anzac Day service at Devonport on Saturday made him reconsider.
“This is about women, when you look into it, that were offered roles, misled – they were taken at times.
“I sat there, and I thought, we honour the soldiers. We honour, the people that have fallen on our battlefields to protect our freedoms.
“Maybe it's contentious, maybe it's not, but here's a statue that's going to commemorate the sacrifice that women have made.”
In response to Busch, Deans acknowledged the “horrific” past the statue represented.
“But I come back to it's not just a statue for all, in this case, it's a statue that has a meaning and a specific content.”
She said the vote was not about the validity of what the statue represented, but rather whether a Takapuna park was the right location for it – earlier noting that Auckland Council’s policy in general was not to installations of memorials within reserves.
Deans noted at the beginning of the item that two previous Devonport-Takapuna local boards had decided unanimously the existing white stone memorial acknowledging Korean War veterans was the appropriate landmark for Barry’s Point Reserve.
MacArthur said he was struck by the number of times the word divisive was mentioned in consultation.
“People come from all places … they want to leave the problems of their home countries back there.
“And New Zealand's not really about importing other people's problems.”
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