Park, Abe to hold 1st one-on-one summit in Seoul next week

SEOUL - South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will hold their first one-on-one summit in Seoul next week on the sidelines of the trilateral leadership meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, Seoul's presidential office said Wednesday.

Kim Kyou-Hyun, senior presidential secretary for foreign affairs, told a press briefing that the sixth round of South Korea-China-Japan summit is scheduled to be held on Nov 1 at the presidential Blue House

It would mark the first trilateral summit in more than three years. The summit between the three Asian nations was initiated in 2008 and had been annually held until 2012.

The suspension of the leadership meeting came mainly from frosty relations between South Korea and Japan over sensitive historical disputes, especially Korean "comfort women" forced into sexual slavery for the militarist Japan's military brothels during World War II.

Seoul has urged Abe to make a "sincere apology" for the wartime sex enslavement, but Tokyo has insisted that the issue was resolved in a 1965 agreement that normalized diplomatic ties between the two nations.

Park and Abe are set to hold a bilateral summit, the first since Park took office in February 2013, on Nov. 2 on the sidelines of the trilateral leadership meeting with China to exchange views on ways of developing Seoul-Tokyo relations and the issues of mutual concern, the secretary said.

The last Seoul-Tokyo summit was seen in May 2012 between then South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak and then Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda.

The secretary said that Park and Abe are expected to exchange "in-depth" views over pending issues between the two countries, including the comfort women issue.

Ahead of the bilateral and trilateral summits, Park will hold a separate one-on-one meeting in Seoul with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Saturday. Li is scheduled to make an official visit to Seoul for three days from Saturday.