SK, Japan seek to settle issue of ‘comfort women’
Print Edition
South Korea and Japan’s foreign ministers will meet next week to settle a bitter row over a Japanese wartime brothel system which has strained bilateral ties, officials said yesterday.
The one-day meeting between South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se and his Japanese counterpart, Fumio Kishida, will be held in Seoul on Monday, Yun’s office said.
The ministers are to discuss “matters of mutual concern” such as the issue of women systematically forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers during World War II, it said.
In Tokyo, Kishida told reporters that he was prepared to “work hard” to settle the dispute over “comfort women,” a day after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ordered him to visit Seoul to seek a breakthrough.
Abe aims for a resolution of the lingering issue that has hammered bilateral ties between the two East Asian allies of the United States.
“I’m ready to be improvisational and work hard over the Japan-South Korea relationship and the comfort women issue,” Kishida said.
He said his visit is “part of efforts toward an early settlement of (bilateral issues) that our leaders agreed” in the summit last month between Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye.
Japan issued a landmark 1993 statement that expressed “sincere apologies and remorse” to the women “who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women.”
But it has long maintained that the dispute was settled in a 1965 normalization agreement with South Korea, which saw Tokyo make a total payment of US$800 million in grants or loans to its former colony.
Seoul is demanding a fresh formal apology and compensation for the Korean women forced to serve as wartime sex slaves in Japanese military army brothels.
The fate of the so-called comfort women is a hugely emotional issue in South Korea and a source of much of the distrust that has marred relations between Seoul and Tokyo for many decades.
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