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S. Korea, Japan to hold talks on wartime sexual slavery in Tokyo

Xinhua, September 17, 2015 Adjust font size:

South Korea and Japan will hold director general-level diplomatic talks in Tokyo Friday to discuss the militaristic Japan's sex enslavement of Korean women during World War II, Seoul's foreign ministry said Thursday.

The ninth round of talks about "comfort women," a euphemism for women forced into sex slaves for the Imperial Japan's military brothels during its 1910-45 colonization of the Korean Peninsula, will be held for the first time in about three months.

Lee Sang-deok, director-general of Northeast Asian affairs bureau at South Korea's foreign ministry, flied to Tokyo for talks with Junichi Ihara, director-general of the Japanese foreign ministry's Asian and Oceanian affairs bureau.

South Korea has called for Japan to sincerely apologize for and compensate for the wartime sexual brutalities, but Japan has claimed that all issues on the sexual slavery were already resolved with the 1965 treaty that normalized diplomatic ties between Seoul and Tokyo.

During the previous round held in Tokyo in June, South Korea and Japan allegedly narrowed down differences on the "comfort women" issue, but they had yet to reach a full agreement. Endi