The foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan on Monday achieved an agreement meant to resolve a decades-long impasse over Korean women forced into Japanese military-run brothels during World War II. [...] The deal, which included an apology from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and an $8.3 million aid fund from Tokyo for the elderly former sex slaves, could reverse decades of animosity and mistrust between the thriving democracies, trade partners and staunch U.S. allies.

The Yomiuri Shimbun asked Kwansei Gakuin University Prof. Shunji Hiraiwa, an observer of contemporary Korean affairs, for his perspective on the significance of the meeting and how the issue of the so-called comfort women and other issues should be approached in the future.

A push by Japan to correct perceived bias in accounts of the country's wartime past is creating a row that risks muddling the positive message in a mammoth public relations campaign to win friends abroad.

The issue of the so-called comfort women needs to be resolved for South Korea-Japan ties to improve, according to activists and the Korean women who were enslaved by the Japanese during World War II. 

Having generated considerable turbulence in East Asia with his nationalistic policies, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appears to be walking back his reactionary stance on modern history—at least in public.

South Korea is open to a summit with Tokyo but demands Japan first take sincere steps on historical issues to create the right conditions for talks to produce substantial results, a spokesman for South Korean President Park Geun-hye said Monday.

Earlier this month, a group of Japanese officials came to Glendale, Calif., with an unusual demand: They wanted the city to take down a public monument in the park next to its public library. The bronze statue of a girl in traditional South Korean dress seated next to an empty chair is a memorial to the 70,000 to 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Chinese, Taiwanese, Indonesian and Dutch “comfort women” — a euphemism for sex slaves — conscripted into Japanese military brothels during World War II.