SEOUL -- South Korean President Park Geun-hye on Monday stressed the importance of curing historical scars left by Japanto open a new future between the two countries.
Park made the comments at the reception hosted by the Japanese embassy in Seoul and held at a hotel in South Korea to mark the 50th anniversary of normalized diplomatic ties between the two neighbors.
Park said that this year provides a historic opportunity for the two countries to move toward a new future, noting that both South Korea and Japan should make this year a turning point going together toward a new cooperation and a future of co-prosperity
Indicating the way of materializing the opportunity, Park said that it would be important to break a way of laying down a heavy burden of historical affairs, "the biggest obstacle" to improving relations between the two countries.
Such a start would make this year become the first year of opening a new future between South Korea and Japan, Park said.
President Park has refused, since her inauguration in early 2013, to sit face-to-face with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, citing his wrong perception of history.
The Abe government has refused to officially apologize and compensate for Imperial Japan's wartime atrocities on the Korean Peninsula during the 1910-45 colonial period.
Abe described comfort women, or Korean women forced into sex slavery for Japanese military brothels during the World War II, as human trafficking by private agents, seeking to shun responsibility of the government.
The Abe cabinet has also been seeking to list 23 facilities of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution, to some of which tens of thousands of Koreans were mobilized for forced labor, as UNESCO World Heritage sites.
Japan had yet to provide detailed resolutions over the issues on sex slaves and slave laborers, making no change in its stance that those issues were resolved through the 1965 treaty that normalized the bilateral diplomatic ties.
Park's comments indicated her call for Japan's concrete measures to cure the historical scars left in the minds and hearts of the victims.
Citing a South Korean old proverb of "Nothing can be done without trust," Park called for Japan to take necessary measures together to deepen trust further between the two countries.
