A meeting between senior diplomats from South Korea and Japan to discuss wartime “comfort women” took place at 3 p.m. on December 27.

Today (December 27), senior diplomats from South Korea and Japan held a closed-door meeting in Seoul, South Korea, to prepare for a meeting between the two countries' foreign ministers tomorrow, to resolve the issue of Korean women forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers during World War II.

During World War II, Korean women had to "comfort" Japanese soldiers. Photo: evietlove.

The South Korean Foreign Ministry said the meeting will take place at 3:00 p.m. this afternoon (local time).

The Korean side was led by Mr. Lee Sang-deok, Director General of the Northeast Asian Affairs Bureau of the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Japanese side was led by Mr. Kimihiro Ishikane, Director General of the Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

This closed-door meeting prepared the thorny issues and the two sides' stances on the "comfort women" issue, which is the focus of Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida's visit to South Korea.

According to plan, the Japanese Foreign Minister will negotiate with his host country counterpart Yun Byung-se on this issue tomorrow.

After the first South Korea-Japan summit between the South Korean President and the Japanese Prime Minister in early November, the two sides held several more expert-level meetings but achieved no results.

While South Korea demands that Japan make an official apology and compensate the victims, Japan argues that its legal responsibility was settled in the 1965 bilateral treaty normalizing diplomatic relations between the two countries./.

According to VOV