South Korea, Japan to hold talks on sex slavery during Second World War

Seoul: Senior diplomats from South Korea and Japan will hold talks about Tokyo’s sexual enslavement of Korean women during the Second World War, Seoul’s foreign ministry said on Thursday. [caption id=“attachment_1718095” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Reuters[/caption] The director general-level dialogue will be held in Tokyo on Friday, Xinhua reported. Lee Sang-deok, director general of the South Korean foreign ministry’s northeast asian affairs bureau, will meet Junichi Ihara, chief of the Asian and Oceanian affairs bureau at Japan’s foreign ministry. The dialogue was launched in Seoul on 16 April when the two sides agreed to have such meetings on a monthly basis, but the talks did not take place in June and August. In June, the Japanese cabinet announced the result of its review on the Kono Statement, an official apology made by then chief cabinet secretary Yohei Kono in 1993 for the wartime sex slavery of Korean women. The statement acknowledged Japan’s involvement in recruitment of more than 200,000 young women, mostly Koreans, and forced them to serve in military brothels during the Second World War. IANS