South Korea, Japan to hold talks on wartime sexual slavery

Seoul: South Korea and Japan will hold director general-level talks in Tokyo on Friday to discuss militaristic Japan`s sex enslavement of Korean women during the Second World War, Seoul`s foreign ministry said on Thursday.

The ninth round of talks about "comfort women", a euphemism for women forced into sex slaves for Imperial Japan`s military brothels during its 1910-45 colonisation of the Korean Peninsula, will be held for the first time in about three months, Xinhua reported.

Lee Sang-deok, director-general of Northeast Asian affairs bureau at South Korea`s foreign ministry, flew to Tokyo for talks with Junichi Ihara, director-general of the Japanese foreign ministry`s Asian and Oceanian affairs bureau.

South Korea has called for Japan to sincerely apologise for and compensate for the wartime sexual brutalities, but Japan has claimed that all issues on sexual slavery were already resolved with the 1965 treaty that normalised diplomatic ties between Seoul and Tokyo.

During the previous round held in Tokyo in June, South Korea and Japan allegedly narrowed down differences on the "comfort women" issue, but they had yet to reach a full agreement.