Women’s rights activists on Wednesday criticized the mayor of the Japanese city Osaka who unilaterally severed the sister-city relationship with San Francisco to protest a “comfort women” memorial in the city.

Osaka Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura, in a letter dated Oct 2 to San Francisco Mayor London Breed, announced his desire to withdraw the city from the 61-year-old agreement.

Yoshimura had written several letters to the late San Francisco mayor Ed Lee and the current mayor London Breed, threatening to terminate the relationship if the city didn’t remove the memorial from public land.

“He is like a coward, escaping from reality. He is like a spoiled child, who picks up the marble when he doesn’t win and leaves. He’s out because he doesn’t get his way,” Lillian Sing, co-chair of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition (CWJC) and a retired Superior Court judge in San Francisco, told a news conference in front of the memorial.

Her organization led efforts to install the memorial in a public park in downtown San Francisco last September, the first of its kind in a major US city.

“It’s a bilateral relationship between Osaka and San Francisco. Who’s going to suffer the most? The citizens of San Francisco, the citizens of Osaka, and the citizens of the world that will suffer from the kind of attitude that the Osaka mayor has,” Sing said.

She said the group has received “a great deal of responses from our international friends but especially citizen friends from Osaka”.

The Kansai Network from Osaka said in an email to the CWJC: “Osaka mayor really has no power to change much of anything between San Francisco and Osaka except to stop spending Osaka money for exchange programs related to citizens.”

“This really hurts citizens of both countries. It is a shame that he is so misdirected in his approach and lacks vision to do the right thing — apologize to ‘comfort women’ and support international relations,” said the network.

The “comfort women” memorial depicts a grandmother looking up at three Asian girls standing on a pedestal and holding hands together. They represent the hundreds of thousands of women who were kidnapped from 13 Asian countries and forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese military before and during World War II. Those women are euphemistically called “comfort women”.

“This statue is a testament to the resilience of women, a testament to women coming out and saying ‘no more’. It’s a testament to everyone who wants to end sexual violence now and forever,” said Judith Mirkinson, president of the CWJC.

“We want to tell the mayor of Osaka that we will never stop fighting for justice. We will always stand with the memories of ‘comfort women’ and all those survivors and their families. There is no absolute way that this statue is coming down,” she said.

The memorial sparked strong opposition from the Japanese right-wing even before it was erected. The most pronounced opposition came from Yoshimura.

The late San Francisco mayor Ed Lee said in a letter dated Feb 3, 2017, to Yoshimura: “Their (the CWJC’s) request was not unprecedented, as San Francisco has many public and private memorials that commemorate some of history’s darkest moments as well as call for peace and reconciliation.”

After Lee passed away in December 2017, Yoshimura wrote to Mayor Breed in July, threatening to terminate the sister-city relationship if she didn’t respond by the end of September.