The leaders of South Korea and Japan yesterday resumed formal talks after a three-year freeze and agreed to try to resolve the decades-old issue of Korean “comfort women” in Japanese military-run brothels during World War II.
The agreement is a step forward, but not a breakthrough. Ties between the two countries have sagged to one of their lowest ebbs since the late 2012 inauguration of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Seoul believes that Abe seeks to obscure Japan’s brutal colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945.
Photo: CNA
Historians say tens of thousands of women from around Asia, including Taiwanese, were sent to front-line military brothels to provide sex to Japanese soldiers.
Japan has already apologized, but many South Koreans see the statements and past efforts at private compensation as insufficient.Abe hoped to weaken a 1993 apology, but later promised not to following protests from South Korea and elsewhere.
Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye yesterday agreed to try harder to settle the issue through dialogue, according to Park’s office.
“President Park noted the issue of comfort women is the biggest obstacle in efforts to improve bilateral ties. She stressed that the issue must be quickly settled in a way that our people can accept,” Blue House deputy national security adviser Kim Kyou-hyun said.
Abe confirmed the agreement.
“On the comfort women issue, I think the issue should not become an obstacle for the next generation so we can build future-oriented cooperative relations,” he told reporters after the meeting. “We have agreed to speed up our negotiations toward a resolution as soon as possible.”
The last two-way summit between Japan and South Korea was in May 2012, when then-South Korean president Lee Myung-bak, met then-Japanese prime minister Yoshihiko Noda.
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