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

Xinhua, December 11, 2015 Adjust font size:

South Korea and Japan will hold a director general-level meeting next week in Tokyo to discuss issues on Japan's sex enslavement of Korean women during World War II, Seoul's foreign ministry said Friday.

The 11th 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 the devastating war, will be held in Tokyo on Dec. 15, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The South Korean side will be led 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 will come after South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed last month to speed up talks about the 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 about Japan's sex slavery of Korean women during its colonization of the Korean peninsula from 1910-45.

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 already settled in a 1965 treaty that normalized diplomatic ties between Seoul and Tokyo. Endit