South Korea confirms Japan summit next week

South Korean President Park Geun-Hye will hold a long-awaited summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe next week, with the sensitive issue of Korean "comfort women" on the agenda, officials said Wednesday.

It will be their first one-on-one meeting after an extended diplomatic freeze, during which Park turned down repeated requests to sit down with Abe.

A spokeswoman for the presidential Blue House said the summit would take place in Seoul on Monday, on the sidelines of a trilateral leadership gathering with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang.

Park and Abe will "exchange ideas on issues of mutual concern including the comfort women issue," the spokeswoman said.

Relations between the two neighbours have never been easy -- clouded by sensitive historical disputes related to Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule over the Korean peninsula and, in particular, the issue of Korean women forcibly recruited to work in Japanese wartime military brothels.

Park's previous refusals to meet Abe were predicated on her insistence that Tokyo had yet to properly atone for its past actions.

But she has come under increasing US pressure to compromise, with Washington wanting its two key military allies in Asia to focus less on the past and more on containing an increasingly assertive China.

- Long diplomatic gap -

The last summit was in December 2011 between the then-South Korean and Japanese leaders Lee Myung-Bak and Yoshihiko Noda.

The trilateral leadership meetings with China were initiated in 2008 and held annually until 2012 when they were suspended after Seoul-Tokyo relations went into one of their regular tailspins.

Premier Li Keqiang will represent China at the gathering in Seoul and will hold a separate one-on-one meeting with President Park.

Seoul had gone public on Monday with its offer of a summit, but Tokyo was slow to respond, amid reports of behind-the-scenes bickering over how Japan's wartime sex slavery might be addressed.

Park had initially signalled her willingness to meet Abe during a recent visit to Washington, but stressed that in order for the summit to be "meaningful" there would have to be timely progress on the "comfort women" issue.

Japan maintains the matter was settled in a 1965 normalisation agreement, which saw Tokyo make a total payment of $800 million in grants or loans to its former colony.

Further complicating rapprochement efforts is a bitter territorial dispute over a group of tiny South Korean-controlled islets in the East Sea (Sea of Japan).

While Abe remains deeply unpopular with the South Korean public -- North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un has enjoyed higher approval ratings -- repeated surveys have shown majority support for a summit and greater diplomatic cooperation.
Source: AFP