SEOUL - South Korea on Friday called on Japan's new government to remember its wartime history, as the country seeks to push its former colonizer to compensate former Korean sex slaves.

South Korea "congratulates" the inauguration of Japan's new Cabinet led by Yoshihiko Noda, the foreign ministry said here in a statement, adding its hopes to further strengthen friendly ties between the two countries.

"We hope the Noda government will look squarely into history, so South Korea and Japan can build a more forward-looking relationship," the ministry said.

The statement comes after South Korea called in a Japanese diplomat in Seoul to publicly urge Japan to take "sincere" measures to compensate Korean women who were exploited as sex slaves under Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule.

The Constitutional Court here said last month the South Korean government violated fundamental rights of the women, often euphemistically called "comfort women," by making no conspicuous efforts to push Japan to compensate them.

Korean wartime sex slaves, whose number the government in the 1990s said stood at 234, were among some 100,000 to 200,000 Asian women forced to provide sexual service to the Imperial Japanese Army.

Japan claims its 1965 Treaty of Basic Relations with South Korea, which formally normalized their ties, already addressed all legal issues concerning the comfort women.