2nd LD Writethru: S.Korea, Japan to hold foreign ministers' talks on wartime sex slavery

South Korea and Japan will hold foreign ministers'meeting next week to discuss about Japan's wartime sex slavery of Korean women during World War II, Seoul's foreign ministry said Friday.

The ministry said in a statement that Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida will visit Seoul on Monday to meet with his South Korean counterpart Yun Byung-se.

During the bilateral talks, they will exchange views on issues of mutual interest, including the victims of Japan's wartime sexual slavery during the devastating war, called comfort women.

The Korean comfort women were forced to serve in Japan's military brothels during its colonization of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945.

South Korean historians estimate that more than 200,000 women, mostly from the Korean Peninsula, were forced into the sex enslavement. Among 238 South Koreans who identified themselves as former sex slaves, only 46 are alive.

On Sunday, the 12th round of director general-level meeting between the two nations about the comfort women issue will be held in Seoul to pre-arrange the talks of foreign ministers.

Two rounds of such meetings had been held since Nov. 2 when South Korean President Park Geun-hye held her first bilateral summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, but those meetings failed to bear any fruits. Park took office in February 2013.

After the bilateral summit held on the sidelines of the trilateral meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, Park and Abe agreed to speed up consultations about the comfort women issue to reach an agreement rapidly.

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