In the northern Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, population 192,000, sits a public park with a simple statue that has become a lightning rod in the brewing political storm among the United States, Japan and South Korea over the past few months.

Erected by the Glendale city council last summer, the statue is of an Asian girl sitting in a chair with an empty chair beside her. Beside that chair is a plaque that reads: "I was a sex slave of (the) Japanese military."

The empty chair, the plaque explains, "symbolizes comfort women survivors who are dying of old age without having yet witnessed justice."