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S. Korea, Japan to hold director-general meeting on wartime sex slavery

Xinhua, November 10, 2015 Adjust font size:

Director general-level diplomats from South Korea and Japan will meet in Seoul Wednesday to discuss the sensitive issue on Japan's wartime sex slavery of Korean women, South Korea's foreign ministry said Tuesday.

The 10th round of such meeting to discuss the issue of comfort women, a euphemism for Korean women forced to serve in Japan's military brothels during World War II, will be held in Seoul on Nov. 11, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The South Korean side will be represented by Lee Sang-deok, director-general of the Northeast Asian affairs bureau of the foreign ministry, while the Japanese side will be headed by Kimihiro Ishikane, director-general of the Japanese foreign ministry's Asian and Oceanian affairs bureau.

The meeting comes about a week after South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed to speed up talks on the comfort women issue.

Park and Abe met in Seoul on Nov. 2 on the sidelines of the trilateral leadership meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang that was held in Seoul the previous day for the first time in more than three years.

It was the first-ever one-on-one summit between Park and Abe as Park had refused to sit down with Abe for historical disputes especially that over Japan's sex slavery of Korean women during World War II.

President Park reiterated her call during a cabinet meeting earlier Tuesday to rapidly resolve the comfort women issue.

South Korea has called on Abe to make a "sincere" apology and properly compensate for Korean comfort women, but Japan has claimed that the issue was resolved in a 1965 treaty that normalized diplomatic ties between Seoul and Tokyo.

Nine rounds of diplomatic talks had been held for resolving the comfort women issue, ending up with no fruits. Enditem