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South Korean President Urges Japan to Admit Past Wrongs

President Park Geun-hye of South Korea paid a silent tribute to the fallen on Sunday on the 96th anniversary of the 1919 uprising against Japan’s colonial rule of Korea.Credit...Pool photo by Jeon Heon-Kyun

SEOUL, South Korea — President Park Geun-hye of South Korea urged Japan on Sunday to have the “courage and honesty” to admit to its historical wrongdoings against Koreans and other Asians, including its enslavement of Korean women in military brothels during World War II.

“As Germany and France overcame conflict and mutual enmity and became leaders in building a new Europe, it is time for South Korea and Japan to write a new history together,” Ms. Park said in a nationally televised speech. “But despite their geographical proximity, the two nations could not get close in heart because of tensions surrounding historical issues.”

Ms. Park delivered her speech to mark the 96th anniversary of the March 1, 1919, uprising against Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, which lasted from 1910 until Japan’s defeat in World War II in 1945. South Korean leaders have traditionally delivered a speech on March 1, a national holiday, often railing against Japan while urging reconciliation with North Korea.

Relations between South Korea and Japan have soured considerably in recent years. South Koreans have complained that under its nationalist prime minister, Shinzo Abe, Japan has intensified its territorial claim to a set of islets held by South Korea and revised textbooks to glorify its history of aggressions in the early 20th century and to promote patriotic education.

For their part, many Japanese have accused South Korea of being unreasonable by repeatedly demanding an apology they felt their country had already given over the sufferings of its neighbors, including the so-called comfort women, a euphemism that Imperial Japan used to refer to numerous Korean and other Asian women who historians said were forced or cheated into sexual slavery for its World War II military.

On Sunday, Ms. Park criticized Japan’s reluctance to address what she called an urgent historical need to bring justice to these women. South Korea demands the Japanese government’s formal apology and compensation for the women, while Japan insists that the issue was settled in the 1965 treaty the two countries signed to establish diplomatic ties. Ms. Park has refused to hold a summit meeting with Mr. Abe, and talks between the two governments have produced no breakthrough on the issue.

“This year alone, two of the old women passed away with no healing of their sufferings,” Ms. Park said, noting that the average age of the remaining 50 known South Korean comfort women was close to 90. “Time is running out to restore dignity to their lives.”

On Sunday, Ms. Park launched a pointed criticism of Mr. Abe by citing an American historian, Alexis Dudden of the University of Connecticut, who recently told the South Korean news media that the Japanese leader was “a politician who would openly supplant long-proven histories with preferred national memories.”

Ms. Dudden and 18 other American historians issued a statement last month to protest what they called the Japanese government’s attempts to censor history textbooks both in Japan and elsewhere about comfort women. The statement was prompted in part by Japan’s request to McGraw-Hill, the American publishing house, to revise one of its history textbooks, “Traditions and Encounters,” to correct “errors” about the women. The publisher refused.

Also in her speech, Ms. Park reiterated her appeal to North Korea to join a dialogue with the South to discuss reunions of Korean families separated during the 1950-53 Korean War.

North Korea has not responded to her overture, repeated several times in recent months. It instead has insisted that South Korea lift economic sanctions imposed on the North following the sinking of a South Korean warship in 2010, which Seoul blamed on the North.

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