A new statue has been erected near the former site of a Japanese imperial shrine on Seoul's Namsan Mountain to commemorate victims of Japan's wartime sexual slavery.
Marking the International Memorial Day for Comfort Women on Wednesday, which was designated by the Moon Jae-in administration last year, the Seoul city government unveiled the statue donated by Korean residents in San Franscisco.
The California-based Jin Duck & Kyung Sik Kim Foundation covered all the production and shipping expenses for the statue built by American sculptor Steven Whyte.
The life-size statue is of three girls from Korea, China and the Philippines -- the home countries of a majority of the victims -- looking straight ahead and holding hands while the late Korean former sex slave Kim Hak-sun looks on.
Japan's sexual enslavement of up to 200-thousand women in the Asia-Pacific during World War Two came to light on August 14, 1991, when Kim publicly testified about her experience.