‘Comfort Women’ Column of Strength in San Francisco, California

In 2017, a civil society organisation unveiled a San Francisco monument dedicated to the “comfort women,” women compelled to provide sexual services for the Japanese military during World War II. The monument became the centre of an international conflict, with both passionate supporters and fierce critics of the monument and its plaque. Following a flurry of correspondence between government officials in Osaka and San Francisco, the monument led to the termination of the decades-long San Francisco-Osaka sister city relationship.