hankyoreh

An umbrella keeps the rain off the statue of a young girl symbolizing the comfort women during a candlelight vigil across from the Japanese embassy in Seoul’s Jongno district

Senior officials from South Korea and Japan resumed working-level discussions on implementing the agreement that the two countries reached on Dec. 28 on the issue of the comfort women for the Imperial Japanese Army.

On Mar. 22, Chung Byung-won, director-general for Northeast Asian Affairs at South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, held a meeting with Kimihiro Ishikane, director-general of the Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau at Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo. During the meeting, Chung and Ishikane discussed how to proceed with implementing the agreement.

This was the first deliberation between director general level officials since Japan and South Korea made the agreement on Dec. 28. Prior to the settlement, the two governments had organized 12 such meetings, beginning in Apr. 2014, in regard to the comfort women issue.

The two officials appear to have swapped ideas about how to implement the Dec. 28 agreement - which is strongly opposed by the South Korean public - after a number of important political events that will take place in both countries this summer. In South Korea, general elections are coming up in April; in Japan, elections for the House of Representatives are scheduled for July.

“Based on our conclusion about the importance of the swift implementation of the Dec. 28 agreement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is currently in deliberations with the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family and the related departments in regard to the issue of setting up the foundation,” said South Korea’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Cho June-hyuck during the regular press conference on Mar. 22.

Japanese newspaper the Sankei Shimbun reported that the governments of the two countries will begin moving forward this summer with efforts to establish the foundation called for in the agreement they reached at the end of last year.

In order to achieve this, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is planning to meet with South Korean President Park Geun-hye during the Nuclear Security Summit that will be held in the US starting on Mar. 31 to reconfirm that both countries are definitely going to implement the agreement, the paper reported.

From that point through this summer, South Korea and Japan plan to continue working-level deliberations toward implementing the agreement while also attempting to placate the former comfort women and groups that support them, including the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Jeongdaehyeop).

Arrangements will also be made for removing a statue of a young woman symbolizing the comfort women from in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul to coincide with the establishment of the foundation, the Sankei Shimbun reported.

However, the fact is that there is virtually no chance of the former comfort women and Jeongdaehyeop accepting the Dec. 28 agreement.

If South Korea’s political opposition is crushed in the April general elections, the Park administration is very likely to accept the 1 billion yen (US$8.30 million) in funding from the Japanese government and to push ahead with establishing the foundation.

By Gil Yun-hyung, Tokyo correspondent and Lee Je-hun, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]