President Park Geun-hye met with a Japanese opposition leader Monday to discuss ways to boost cooperation between the two neighbors, an official said.
Presidential spokesman Min Kyung-wook did not provide any details of Park’s meeting with Katsuya Okada, leader of Japan’s opposition Democratic Party, at Cheong Wa Dae, South Korea’s presidential office.
The meeting came as South Korea and Japan prepare to celebrate Aug. 15, which marks the 70th anniversary of both Korea’s independence from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule and the end of World War II.
Okada also plans to meet with South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se later in the day.
South Korea has urged Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to uphold previous administrations’ position on history in his upcoming speech.
Abe has vowed to inherit Japan’s two previous statements of apology — the 1995 Murayama and the 1993 Kono statements — Abe’s special envoy, Fukushiro Nukaga, told Park during his trip to Seoul in June.
In 1993, then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono issued a landmark statement recognizing the military’s involvement in establishing and operating “comfort stations,” a euphemism for brothels where hundreds of thousands of Korean and other Asian women were forced into sexual slavery.
Two years later, then-Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama acknowledged and apologized for the suffering his country inflicted on neighboring nations, including Korea, through its aggressions in the early part of the 20th century.
South Korea and Japan are close economic partners, though they have long been in conflict over territory and other historical disputes stemming from Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.
One key unresolved issue is that of sexual slavery during the second world war. South Korea demands Japan acknowledge its responsibility for the sex slaves, while Japan insists the issue was settled under the normalization treaty of 1965. (Yonhap)
