A meeting in April with senior South Korean officials is being considered to lay the groundwork for a bilateral summit, diplomatic sources said Thursday.
Foreign Ministry officials from both sides are ready to step up preparations for the so-called director general-level meeting, including deciding which issues to discuss, the sources said.
South Korea has insisted the talks focus exclusively on the "comfort women," the euphemistic term Japan uses to refer to the tens of thousands of girls and women who were forced to provide sex to Imperial Japanese soldiers before and during World War II. But Japan argues that the talks should allow room for discussion of a broader range of bilateral issues.