The Prime Minister of Japan and the President of South Korea met for the first time at a banquet in Madrid.

TOKYO, June 29 – RIA Novosti. Yoshihiko Isozaki, secretary general of the Japanese government, said at a press conference in Tokyo that the leaders of Japan and South Korea held a brief meeting in Madrid for the first time.

“At the banquet, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and President of the Republic of Korea Yoon Seok-yeol met and exchanged a very short greeting. He is in a very difficult situation. The Japanese government plans to establish relations with South Korea to improve relations based on its position.” said.

It was previously reported that the first tripartite meeting of the leaders of the USA, Japan and South Korea since 2017 will be held on the sidelines of the NATO summit.

The Japanese Prime Minister did not attend Yoon Seok-yeol’s inauguration ceremony due to the recent cooling of relations between the two countries. The main barriers between the two countries were “comfort women” and forced labor in Japanese factories among Koreans during WWII.

“Comfort women” system, II. It is a form of forced prostitution for the needs of the Japanese army in Asian countries during World War II. In 1965, Japan paid Korea $500 million in compensation for the damage done during the war years, hoping that this would clear all contradictions. However, the issue of “comfort women” was brought up again by South Korea, and only after pressure from the United States did the two Asian allies agree on a peace deal that was fixed in the 2015 agreement. It aimed to “finally and irreversibly” resolve all contradictions so that the “comfort women” issue would never again affect South Korea-Japan relations. But since the deal was signed under President Moon Jae-in, under former President Park Geun-hye, who resigned as a result of a corruption scandal, the aid fund that Japan had already transferred about $9 million at the time, was dissolved and the settlement issues issue froze.

At the same time, Japan believes that until now there has been no official document confirming the existence of forced prostitution. Japan has repeatedly expressed its official position at the UN. In February 2018, a representative of Japan’s Foreign Ministry at the UN confirmed that the widespread belief that Japanese-occupied Asian countries were forced into prostitution during the war was based on journalist Seiji Yoshida’s “testimony” published in the newspaper Asahi. The 1980s, which later turned out to be fiction. . Prior to this broadcast, the Korean side did not make any claims to Japan in this regard and did not raise the issue of “comfortable woman”. In the 1980s, Yoshida spoke of an alleged hunt to lure Korean women into brothels, but the facts he described were not verified by other sources and turned out to be fiction. The newspaper made a public apology in 2014 for publishing false evidence under the guise of a genuine fact.

Despite this, under a deal made in December 2015, Japan promised to pay 1 billion yen (about $9 million) to former comfort women, provided the decision was “final and irreversible.” The South Korean side agreed with this statement.

At the end of 2018, a South Korean court ruled that World War II. He ordered Japanese companies Nihon Steel, Fujikoshi Corporation, and Mitsui Havy Industries, which employed forced labor in Korea during World War II, to pay compensation to the victims. However, Japan believes that all compensation was paid to South Korea in 1965, hoping that the South Korean government would send some of the $500 million paid to South Korea as personal compensation to the victims as compensation for damage during the war years. . But this did not happen, the victims received almost nothing, and the government diverted funds to the development of the economy and infrastructure. Victims continue to seek their rights in the courts, but Japan believes that the plaintiff should be the South Korean government, not Japanese businesses.

Thus, in 2018, no compensation was paid by court decision and the assets of these companies in South Korea were arrested by court decision.