The city of Osaka officially ended a longstanding sister-city partnership with San Francisco over the memorial for women who were sex slaves in World War II.
The monument has stood in San Francisco for a year. It depicts young women from Korea, China and the Philippines standing on a pedestal holding hands, while a statue of Kim Hak-sun, a Korean activist, gazes up at them.
But the view from Osaka, Japan, of the memorial, which commemorates the tens of thousands of “comfort women” who were detained and raped by Japanese soldiers before and during World War II, has been critical. This week, the controversy boiled over as Osaka officially severed its sister-city partnership with San Francisco.
In a letter dated Tuesday, Osaka’s mayor, Hirofumi Yoshimura, followed through on a threat issued a year ago to end his city’s longstanding relationship with San Francisco in protest of the monument, saying it presented a one-sided message.
“I earnestly request that you promptly remove” the memorial and an accompanying plaque “without further delay,” Mr. Yoshimura wrote, according to an emailed copy of the letter. He added that he would revive ties with San Francisco if they were removed from city property.
That is not going to happen, according to Judith Mirkinson, the president of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition, an alliance of immigrant women’s groups that worked for years to erect the statue and funded it through private donations.
“It is not coming down,” she said.
Jeff Cretan, a spokesman for Mayor London Breed, told local news outlets on Tuesday that he expected some of the ties between the two cities to continue through members of a citizens’ San Francisco-Osaka sister city committee and their counterparts in Osaka.
On Thursday, Ms. Breed said in a statement that one mayor could not unilaterally end a relationship that has existed between the two cities for more than 60 years.
She described the memorial as “a symbol of the struggle faced by all women who have been, and are currently, forced to endure the horrors of enslavement and sex trafficking.
