Former Korean 'comfort women' ask Seoul to press Tokyo to settle issue

Former Korean "comfort women," the euphemistic term for wartime sex slaves, met South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan in Seoul on Wednesday and urged him to press Japan to settle the issue of compensation.

Yonhap reported that the South Korean government officially sent a request to its Japanese counterpart to hold talks to settle the issue.

Hundreds of thousands of Asian women, including Koreans, were forcibly drafted for sex slavery for Japanese soldiers during the war. The women have been demanding an apology and compensation from the Japanese government for decades.

Shinsuke Sugiyama, director-general of the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s Asian and Oceanian affairs bureau, said that Japan has no plans to reopen talks with Seoul. He said the Japanese government's consistent position is that the issue of compensation was fully and completely resolved under the normalization treaty.