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Minjoo Party of Korea leader Kim Jong-in shakes hands greets Japanese Ambassador to South Korea Koro Bessho at the National Assembly in Seoul

A backlash is expected after Kim Jong-in, leader of the Minjoo Party of Korea, said during a meeting with the Japanese ambassador to South Korea that the Dec. 28 comfort women agreement reached by the two countries should be quickly implemented. The remarks contradict the official position of the Minjoo Party, which has criticized the government for its rushed handling of the agreement and has called for the agreement to be renegotiated.

“Kim Jong-in told Japanese Ambassador to South Korea Koro Bessho that South Korea and Japan need to work together to achieve closer relations. He also said that, though they had reached an agreement on the comfort women, it was not being properly implemented and that the implementation should be speeded up,” said Minjoo Party Spokesperson Lee Jae-kyung on Apr. 26.

Lee added that Kim was trying to say that Japan’s insistence that the comfort woman statue outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul must be removed before it implements the agreement was very upsetting to South Koreans and that Japan needs to understand the public sentiment that derives from history and take quick steps to resolve this. Kim took a courtesy call from Bessho at the party leader’s office in the National Assembly on Tuesday and held a closed-door meeting.

Kim‘s appeal for Japan to implement the comfort women agreement stands in opposition to the Minjoo Party’s official position that the comfort women agreement is invalid. Since it added a pledge to renegotiate the comfort women agreement to its platform at the end of last year, the Minjoo Party has taken the lead in pushing for the nullification of the agreement. It even submitted a resolution to the National Assembly calling for renegotiation.

But Kim’s remarks do not appear to be a mere slip of the tongue. When Kim met the former comfort women on Mar. 1 - an important holiday in South Korea that marks Koreans’ struggle against the Japanese occupation - he hinted that it would be impractical to invalidate the agreement. “Since our two governments have concluded the negotiations, I think that we are not currently in a situation to fix the agreement,” Kim said.

“The position of our party is that this agreement is not legally binding,” Lee said. “We interpret his comments as meaning not so much that our position has changed as that we want to quickly implement the items already agreed upon so that we can make some progress on a diplomatic level.”

By Um Ji-won, staff reporter

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