SEOUL, June 25 (Xinhua) -- No summit has been planned between the leaders of South Korea and Japan during the upcoming Group of 20 (G20) summit in Osaka, Japan, the South Korean presidential Blue House said Tuesday.
An unnamed Blue House official was quoted by local media as saying the summit between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe would not happen during the G20 summit slated to last from Friday to Saturday in Japan.
The official noted that Japan did not seem to be ready for the summit though South Korea was always ready for it, saying there has been no response from Tokyo over Seoul's summit offer.
The Blue House official added that if the Japanese side asks for the bilateral summit during the G20 summit, Moon would always be ready to meet Abe at the scene.
Relations between Seoul and Tokyo continued to fray since Japan protested late year against the South Korean top court's ruling that Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp. should pay compensation for the forced labor victims.
The South Korean top court passed a similar judgement, ordering Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. to compensate two groups of South Korean victims over wartime forced labor.
Additional South Korean victims sued other Japanese firms, including Nachi-Fujikoshi Corp. and Mitsubishi Materials Corp., claiming that they or their family members were adversely affected by the wartime forced labor.
South Korean historians said at least 700,000 young Koreans were coerced into hard labor without pay by Japanese firms during the Pacific War. The Korean Peninsula was colonized by Imperial Japan from 1910 to 1945.
Japan claimed that the reparation issues were settled through the 1965 accord that normalized the diplomatic ties between South Korea and Japan following the colonial era, but South Korea said the pact did not refer to individuals' rights to compensation.
