South Korean trucks transport humanitarian aid to North Koreans in this photo.
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“Seoul wants to resolve the comfort women issue through working-level talks while Tokyo wants to discuss various other issues such as Korea’s import regulations on Japan’s fisheries and marine products and the prosecution of Seoul branch manager of Japan-based Sankei Shimbun”.
“I expect the Japanese government to quickly present a solution that is acceptable to the victims and deemed reasonably by the Korean people”, Park said in a written interview.
A Seoul court on Friday ordered a Japanese iron and steel company to pay compensation to eight South Koreans who carried out forced labour in its plants during Second World War.
“Our two countries need to tackle history issues on the basis of a correct understanding of history, thereby creating a turning point for a new journey into the future”, she said. During the meeting, both leaders agreed to try harder to settle the comfort women issue through dialogue.
South Korea demands Japan acknowledge its responsibility for the sex slaves, while Japan insists the issue was settled under the normalization treaty of 1965.
They were protesting against Park’s plans to make the labor market more flexible by giving employers greater leeway in dismissing workers and her decision for a government-selected panel to write the high school history textbook. James Lewis, director of strategic technologies at the Center for Strategic and global Studies in Washington, says Iran and North Korea scaled down their activities for several months while Iran negotiated the nuclear deal with the US but are back to business as usual. North Korea counts on its prowess in missiles for earning sorely needed income while China, the source of virtually all the North’s oil and most of its food, goes through an economic downturn that impacts the North’s dilapidated economy.
Park’s two liberal predecessors held summit talks with then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, the late father of the current leader, in Pyongyang in 2000 and 2007, respectively.
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Kim also reportedly gave a speech in which he noted that North Korea was “ready for any kind of war against the United Sates”.
