Regarding the May 20 AP article "Sex slave plaque in New Jersey riles Japanese officials": As an American citizen, I find it inappropriate for such a monument to be built in the state of New Jersey. If Koreans, on their own soil on the Korean Peninsula, feel the need to build such monuments, I can't object. However, I see no sense in such monuments being built in the United States, other than to cause bad feelings between people. The fact that women were used as "comfort women" by the Japanese during World War II has nothing to do with New Jersey or the U.S.

I wish people of all countries who immigrate to any foreign country would use the move as a positive step toward a better future for themselves rather than to simply bring their anger and bad feelings along with them to impose on everyone else.

World War II ended 67 years ago! Almost all the young adults and certainly all the older adults who were alive at that time are dead now. Let's work on today's problems today. We have many timely and much more important problems to work on. A comparable and current atrocity is human trafficking. We should all be concentrating our efforts, attention and finances to stop human trafficking. That would prove we have learned from history and will work toward improving our world for those who are alive today.

Building monuments is nothing but a gesture. It does nothing to change history and does nothing to help those who need our help today. It's strange and a waste of human time and emotion, in my opinion, to worry about the wrongs of yesterday, and build monuments to yesterday, when people are being bought and sold into human labor and sexual slavery right now.

As members of the human race, what have we learned, and what changes have we made, since the days of comfort women? The answer: nothing and none.

The opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of The Japan Times.

karen forde