17/11/28 10:37:17.57 6BTFI0nm0.net
The New Yorker October 12, 2017
Whyte received some twelve hundred negative social-media messages and e-mails, including form letters
copied and pasted from a Japanese Web site threatening economic boycotts of his work. Activists attended
hearings about the statue and called an elderly survivor a prostitute when she testified before the
San Francisco Board of Supervisors. More recently, the mayor of Osaka threatened to end his city’s
long-standing sister-city relationship with San Francisco if the statue is not removed―and the Japanese
consul-general in San Francisco, Jun Yamada, wrote a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle
calling the statue a “half-told” story, and warning that if the city wants to “give equal treatment to
all cases, there will be no free space left anywhere.”
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