Osaka Mayor Hirofumi Yosimura said his city will end its 60-year relationship with San Francisco as sister cities a day after the local government in the US city officially approved the sculpture of the so-called "comfort women," the victims of sexual slavery of the Japanese army during the Second World War, DPA reported.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government has urged San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee not to accept the sculpture, which is donated by a private organization. Last week, the city council approved the settlement, and Abe described the decision as "a tremendous regret" for the future relations. Osaka Masaji Municipal Council member of the Liberal Democratic Party criticized the decision to break the twinning relationship with the US city, Gigi press agency reported.

"It's a disgrace, there are no other words to describe," he said. "Reversing twinning is not the right approach to the issue." In 2011, the first sculpture of this type was placed at the Japanese embassy in Seoul, and then similar sculptural images appeared in Australia, Germany and some US states, including Virginia, California and New Jersey. Before and during World War II, according to historians, up to 200,000 women and girls had been subjected to sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army. Many of the women, known as "women for decay", were from Korea, which from 1910 to 1945 was under Japanese colonial rule.

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