S. Korea, Japan seek to lower tension over ‘comfort women’

TIL Desk/World/Tokyo/ Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met with a senior South Korean envoy today, as the two countries try to lower tensions over Tokyo’s wartime use of “comfort women”.

The special envoy dispatched by South Korea’s new President Moon Jae-In said in Tokyo that Seoul wants regular summits and improved relations, which have been hindered by the memory of Japan’s harsh colonial rule of the Korean peninsula from 1910-1945.

Abe also struck a conciliatory note, saying: “With the new president, I wish to build future-oriented Japan-South Korea relations.”  In what both governments hoped was a major step forward, the two countries had agreed in 2015 to a deal designed to end a row over Korean “comfort women” forced into sex slavery for Japanese soldiers during the World War II.

However, the election this month of Moon as president, replacing the ousted Park Geun-Hye, has cast doubt over the agreement, which both governments previously had said “resolved (the issue) finally and irreversibly”.  Moon in a phone call with Abe last week said that most Koreans cannot accept the agreement.