Lee visits Japan amid tensions over wartime sexual slavery

OSAKA, Japan -- President Lee Myung-bak arrived in Japan on Saturday for talks with Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, overshadowed by fresh tensions arising from Tokyo's sexual enslavement of Korean women during World War II.

Lee's two-day trip to Japan was originally expected to be largely an occasion that would strengthen the recovery of bilateral relations strained earlier this year over Tokyo's renewal of territorial claim to South Korea's easternmost islets of Dokdo.

But tensions flared anew just days before the trip was to begin as Japan protested the establishment of a statue in front of its embassy in Seoul in memory of Korean women forced into sexual slavery for Japan's World War II soldiers. Japan ruled the Korean Peninsula as a colony from 1910-45.

Japan asked Seoul to block civic activists from installing the "Peace Monument," a statue of a young girl dressed in a traditional Korean dress, but South Korea rejected the demand, saying that setting up the monument does not require approval from the government.

Tokyo has also rebuffed Seoul's demand for official negotiations on compensating the aging Korean women, known euphemistically as "comfort women." Seoul has been making the demand since its Constitutional Court ruled in August that it is unconstitutional for the Seoul government to make no specific efforts to settle the matter with Tokyo.

Japan maintains that all issues regarding its colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, including the comfort women, were settled in a 1965 package compensation deal under which the two countries normalized their relations.

Officials in Seoul said Lee plans to raise the compensation issue during talks with Noda scheduled for Sunday. But chances appear slim that Japan would change its position on the issue. (Yonhap News)