Over 200,000 Women Victims of Wartime Sexual Slavery

Up to 200,000 women and girls were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army between 1932 and 1945. Last night, a six-member Auckland local board had to decide whether their memory could be marked in a Takapuna park, with the Japanese Embassy’s formal opposition sitting on the table in front of them.

The Devonport-Takapuna Local Board voted 4-2 to refuse a bronze statue offered to the Korean community for their own cultural garden at Barry’s Point Reserve. The board considered 672 public submissions. Among them was a formal one from Japanese Ambassador Makoto Osawa, warning the statue would be “needlessly stirring up” the comfort women issue and could have a “significant impact” on bilateral and sister-city relationships. He pointed to Osaka, which ended its more than 60-year sister-city relationship with San Francisco in 2018 after a similar memorial was installed there.

“That is not a neutral piece of advice. It is a worked example of consequences, delivered to a six-member local board,” said Jillaine Heather, Chief Executive of the Free Speech Union.

“We are not second-guessing the public consultation, and local boards have to make hard calls. Our concern is the one submission that should not have been on the scales as it appears to have been: a foreign embassy’s. Once a foreign government’s discomfort becomes a factor a local body has to manage, the public square shrinks.”

“The board chair has described the statue as ‘a political statement’. That standard is hard to apply consistently. Cenotaphs, Anzac memorials, war graves, plaques to past injustices: every public memorial makes a statement. The question is which statements we consider acceptable, and whose discomfort decides.”

“Korean New Zealanders offered a memorial to victims of one of the worst sexual atrocities of the twentieth century, in their own designated cultural space. Public space is precisely where communities mark their history, and they should be able to have that conversation with their local board, not under the shadow of a foreign embassy’s submission.”

Heather noted the Free Speech Union has just completed a New Zealand tour with Sarah McLaughlin of the US-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), whose work documents how foreign governments use diplomatic channels to pressure Western institutions into quiet self-censorship.

“On tour with Sarah only last week, we heard case after case of how this works in practice. The censorship rarely has to be named to be effective.”

The Free Speech Union is writing to Auckland Council and to the Devonport-Takapuna Local Board seeking clarity on:

• The weight given to the Japanese Embassy’s submission in the final decision.
• What guidance local boards are given to protect domestic democratic processes from foreign government pressure.