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S.Korean foreign minister to visit Japan

Xinhua, June 17, 2015 Adjust font size:

South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se will visit Japan this weekend for the first time under the Park Geun-hye government, Seoul's foreign ministry said Wednesday.

Yun will arrive in Tokyo Sunday to hold talks with Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, and participate in the receptions Monday at the South Korean embassy there to mark the 50th anniversary of the normalized diplomatic relations between the two countries.

It will mark the first foreign minister's trip to Japan since South Korean President Park Geun-hye took office in February 2013.

South Korea and Japan normalized diplomatic ties on June 22, 1965, about 20 years after the Korean Peninsula was liberated from the 1910-45 Japanese colonial rule.

Yun was originally scheduled to visit Japan in April 2013, but he canceled the visit after the then Japanese finance minister paid tribute to the notorious Yasukuni Shrine, a symbol of Japan' s militaristic past as it honors about 2.4 million Japanese war dead, including 14 Class-A war criminals.

Yun and Kishida are expected to focus mainly on the issue of comfort women, or Korean women forced into sex enslavement by the Japanese Imperial Army at the military brothels during World War II.

President Park has refused, since her inauguration, to sit down face-to-face with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe citing his wrong perception of history.

South Korea has adopted the so-called "two-track" diplomacy with Japan, which means South Korea would seek to cooperate with Japan on economy and security, separately from historical issues such as the comfort women and territorial disputes on the easternmost islets of Dokdo, called Takeshima in Japan.

President Park said in an interview with Washington Post last week that there has been "considerable progress" on the comfort women issue and that South Korea and Japan were "in the final stage" of their negotiations.

Director-general diplomats from the two countries held the eighth round of talks about the comfort women issue in Tokyo on June 11.

According to historians, at least 200,000 women, mostly Koreans, were forced to serve the militaristic Japan as sex slaves during World War II.

Two former South Korean comfort women, aged 91 and 81 each, passed away on June 11. Among 238 identifying themselves as former sex slaves in South Korea, only 50 are still alive. Endi