HACKENSACK, N.J. (AP) - Four years ago, noticing plaques at the county courthouse commemorating slavery, the Holocaust and other atrocities, Korean-American community leader Chejin Park struck upon the idea of adding a tribute to the "comfort women" of World War II.
To his surprise, the seemingly small, local gesture — to honor the more than 200,000 mostly Korean and Chinese women forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers — would make a tiny northern New Jersey town a flashpoint in an international controversy.
Local officials would rebuff a request by Japanese officials to take down the first plaque put up just over two years ago in the town of Palisades Park, a square-mile borough outside New York where a majority of residents are of Korean descent.
But now the dedication of a second marker, this one at the courthouse whose memorials had inspired Park, has been held up until the wording can be changed to remove a reference to the Japanese government.
The top government official in Bergen County, Kathleen Donovan, said the delay is due to a mix-up, not any new pressure from Japanese officials.
Donovan and the county's legislative body, the freeholder board, had asked that the second plaque state that Japan's Imperial army, not the Japanese government, was responsible for what happened to those women, she said.
"Our monument is not anti-Japanese government; it is pro-comfort women," said Donovan, the county executive. "We want to be very clear that it was the Imperial Japanese armed forces and not the government that, according to our historical research, committed these acts."
Historians say the women, mostly from the Korean peninsula and China, were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers in military brothels. But rightists in Japan have questioned whether the women were coerced by the military to be prostitutes.
Some surviving women and their supporters have held a weekly vigil in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul for more than two decades, saying that an apology issued by a Japanese government official in 1993 has failed to convince South Koreans that Japan is truly contrite.
The issue is an important one for Bergen County, where the Korean population has quadrupled since 1990 and now accounts for nearly 8 percent of the county's more than 900,000 residents. Last year, Donovan made an official visit to the county's sister city of Dangjin, South Korea, and met with some elderly women who, decades ago, were forced to provide sex for the soldiers.
