South Korea and Japan are set to hold a working-level meeting Sunday on the issue of former Korean sex slaves for Japan’s World War II soldiers, officials said.
Lee Sang-deok, director-general handling Northeast Asian affairs at the Foreign Ministry, is scheduled to meet with his Japanese counterpart, Kimihiro Ishikane, around 3 p.m. in Seoul, officials said.
The two sides are expected to try to work out differences to ensure their top diplomats can produce a deal on wartime sexual slavery, the biggest thorn in the side of bilateral relations.
The director general-level meeting — the 12th round of these talks — is being held a day before talks between Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se and his Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida on the issue.
South Korea and Japan have long been at odds over the issue of hundreds of thousands of Korean women forced to serve as sex slaves for Japanese troops during World War II. Korea was under Japan’s brutal colonial rule from 1910 to 1945.
South Korea demands Japan acknowledge its responsibility for the sex slaves, while Japan insists the issue was settled under the normalization treaty of 1965.
In November, President Park Geun-hye met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in their first bilateral summit, and they agreed to expedite consultations for the early resolution of the wartime sex slavery issue.
The issue has gained urgency in recent years as the victims are dying off. In 2007, more than 120 South Korean victims were alive, but the number has since dropped to 47, with their average age standing at nearly 90. (Yonhap)
