Activist group on mission to collect 100 million signatures for comfort women

June 23, 2014
A Nabi USA member collects signatures from passerby at Santa Monica Pier for the 100 Million Signatures Campaign on June 21. (Kim Young-jae / The Korea Times)

A Nabi USA member collects signatures from passerby at Santa Monica Pier for the 100 Million Signatures Campaign on June 21. (Kim Young-jae / The Korea Times)

Members of Nabi USA in Los Angeles held a campaign near Santa Monica Pier on Saturday as a part of a movement to collect 100 million signatures worldwide for the Japanese government to provide reparations to Korean comfort women.

About 20 Nabi volunteers came out to hand out butterfly-shaped information pamphlets and rubber bracelets for its first U.S. outreach. The campaign, a part of the Korean Council for the Women’s 100 Million Signatures Campaign, demands a resolution “of the Japanese military sexual slavery issue.”

While elderly women in their 60s and 70s staged Korean traditional “samulnori,” Nabi members asked passerby for signatures.

Angela Lee, president of Nabi L.A., said the council and Nabi clubs around the world will deliver the first round of 1.5 million signatures, gathered in 92 countries around the world, to the 26th session of the U.N’s Human Rights Council.

Nabi USA operates additional U.S. branches in New York and Washington, D.C. and plans to continue the signature campaign.

2 Comments

  1. konohazuku001

    August 2, 2014 at 10:10 PM

    Based on these following facts,there was no Korean comfort-woman unwillingly kidnapped by Japanese army or officials.
    1.No one knows the names of the villages or towns where the comfort-women were actually kidnapped.
    2.So far as the comfort-women kidnapping issue is concerned, there is no obvious record which had been written before 1990s.
    3.It is quite strange that so many as 200,000 victims had kept silence from 1945 to the 1990s.
    4.A large amount of money were paid to the Comfort-women in reward for their jobs. Back in those days,it was not a rare case that poor parents necessarily sold their daughters to get money.
    5.There have been no witnesses who can testify the kidnapping incidents. If there had been many comfort-women who were kidnapped, there must have been many witnesses. But nobody saw the incident.
    6.There was no real testimony by the kidnappers. It was already proved that Seiji Yoshida’s testimony was absolutely false statements. At that time in Korea, most of policemen and officials were Koreans, not Japanese.
    7.There was no protest opposing to the kidnapped comfort-women.If there had been kidnapped comfort-women as real events, riots must have been raised.
    8.In Korea, from time immemorial to now ,there always have been many prostituts. In the period of the World WarII,it is quite natural that there must have been prostitution markets there.
    9.Most of Korean comfort-women say “I was sold.” or “I was deceived.” A small number of women say “I was kidnaped.” The credibility of their testimonies are in question. The contentions are rather suspect evidences.
    10.Although The Japan-Korea Basic Relations Treaty was concluded in 1965, South Korea currently lodges various reasons in order to draw out as much money as possible from Japan.
    However,at the time of the conclusion of the treaty, they never argued about the comfort-women issue at all.

  2. The truth

    June 17, 2015 at 6:52 PM

    Dear konohazuku001,
    I know you want to avoid the fact because you think it makes Japanese look bad, but let’s face it.
    There are many comfort women who are still alive. And there are documents in the Japanese language that say Japanese soldiers kidnapped or lied to them and took them to the war field tp raped them.
    Not only just Korean women but also other countries women were taken and became comfort women. Have you ever thought about your mother or sister were taken away from their family and someone raped them?
    Hiding the truth does not make Japanese look good. Admit and face it!