S. Korea, Japan to discuss 'comfort women'

Japan and South Korea will hold talks on Wednesday centering on the "comfort women" issue that has been a major contributor to soured ties between the two nations.

Japan will be represented by Kimihiro Ishikane, director general of the Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, officials said in Tokyo on Tuesday.

South Korea will have Lee Sang-deok, director-general of the Foreign Ministry's Northeast Asian Affairs Bureau, expressing its opinions on the matter.

The two nations' senior representatives are hoping to make some headway on the issue after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korea President Park Geun-hye agreed to speed up talks on the matter following a recent summit in Seoul.

At talks in the South Korean capital on Nov 2, the first between Abe and Park since they took office, representatives from both countries were told to move discussions forward toward eventually reaching a joint agreement on the thorny issue.

"With this year marking the 50th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic ties, we agreed to accelerate negotiations with the aim of concluding them as early as possible." Abe told reporters in Tokyo on Tuesday.

Comfort women is a euphemism used to describe the girls and women who were coerced into sexual slavery in Japanese military brothels during the country's brutal wartime Asian occupation.

Tensions between the two nations have been seen as thawing following a recent trilateral summit between Japan, South Korea and China.

However, the comfort women issue, as far as South Korea is concerned, remains far from being dealt with adequately by Japan.

Seoul believes that Tokyo should account for its culpability in the wartime mass rapes of Korean women and apologize and compensate the victims in a way that is acceptable to the survivors.

Japan believes the issue of compensation was resolved in a bilateral treaty that saw diplomatic ties between the two countries normalized.

During Abe's first stint as prime minister in 2006 and 2007, he said there was "no proof" of coercion regarding the forced conscription of comfort women.