South Korean President Park Geun-hye on Monday signaled thawing ties with Japan on non-historical issues after she refused to sit down face-to-face with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Park told a meeting with senior presidential advisors that South Korea and Japan still have a different view about certain issues, indicating the comfort women, or Korean women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army at the military brothels during World War II.
She, however, called for the advisors to find ways of developing the bilateral relations in a future-oriented manner by focusing on issues that need to be cooperated by the two nations, while trying to resolve controversial issues separately.
Her comments reflected the country's "two-track" diplomacy with Japan, which means South Korea would seek to cooperate with Japan on economy and security, separately from historical issues such as the comfort women and territorial disputes on the easternmost islets of Dokdo, called Takeshima in Japan.
President Park said in an interview with Washington Post last week that there has been "considerable progress" on the comfort women issue and that South Korea and Japan were "in the final stage" of their negotiations.
Director-general diplomats from the two countries held the eighth round of talks about the comfort women issue in Tokyo on June 11 ahead of the 50th anniversary of normalized diplomatic ties between South Korea and Japan.
On June 22 some 50 years ago, former President Park Chung-hee, father of the incumbent president, agreed with Japan to normalize bilateral relations, about 20 years after Japan's colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula ended in 1945.
Japan has insisted that all issues on the wartime sex slavery were resolved through the normalization.
Park said that it would be meaningful to hold occasions to mark the 50th anniversary, but she stressed how to resolve the deadlocked relations between Seoul and Tokyo would be more meaningful.
Park has refused to hold a summit with Abe since she took office in February 2013, citing Abe's wrong perception of history. Abe described the sex slavery as an act of trafficking by private agents, seeking to shun responsibilities of the Japanese government.
According to historians, at least 200,000 women, mostly Koreans, were forced to serve the militaristic Japan as sex slaves during WWII.
Two former South Korean comfort women, aged 91 and 81 each, passed away on June 11. Among 238 identifying themselves as former sex slaves in South Korea, only 50 are still alive.
Abe stirred up resentment from people in neighboring countries, especially South Korea and China, as well as the global society by visiting and paying tribute to the notorious Yasukuni Shrine, a symbol of Japan's militaristic past as the shrine honors about 2.4 million Japanese war dead, including 14 Class-A war criminals.
