What’s Early Settlement?

Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, had a summit meeting with South Korean President, Park Geun-hye, for the first time as national leaders, at the Blue House in Seoul on Monday. In spite of the significance of the fact that those two leaders had a meeting, the outcome was strange. They agreed on seeking “early settlement” of comfort woman issue. Early settlement? What’s that?

The meeting was held including both foreign ministers for an hour and continued with other officials for additional forty-five minutes. “This is the greatest obstacle in improving our bilateral relationship. It should soon be resolved on the level which is acceptable for victims and understandable for our nation,” Park told Abe on comfort woman issue.

Abe revealed some details about the meeting. “We agreed on accelerating the negotiation for early settlement,” told Abe to the reporters. “For constructing future-looking cooperative relation,” he stressed, “it cannot be tolerated for us to leave obstacles to future generation.”

According to a report of Mainichi Shimbun, one official of Japanese government explained the meaning of “early settlement” as issuing order to accelerate current talks on the level of bureau chief of both Foreign Ministries, which made no sense. The fact that Abe referred to “early settlement” meant that comfort woman issue was not settled, contradicting Japan’s longtime argument that all claims had been settled with an agreement simultaneous with Japan-South Korea Basic Treaty in 1965. On this point, Abe told that the standpoint of Japan has not changed. He used different tongues between Park and Japanese citizens.

It is likely that both governments put the highest priority on maintaining momentum for continuous summit meeting in their bilateral relationship. But, that compromised agreement will produce no meaningful outcome. The people in South Korea expect that a certain solution is coming from Japan by the end of this year, because Abe referred to “regarding fiftieth anniversary” from normalizing bilateral relationship. There is no willingness in the government of Japan to settle comfort woman issue within this year.

In Japanese, the settlement, or daketsu in Japanese language, generally means concluding negotiation, such as overwhelming settlement in Trans-Pacific Partnership last month. The agreement of Japan-South Korea summit meeting obviously contradicted what Japanese government had been telling to its citizens. Abe administration needs to drop one of the two options; no problem exists on comfort woman issue or it needs to deal with the problem.