Seoul: South Korea and Japan will hold talks at a director general-level in Tokyo on Friday, to discuss militaristic Japan's sex enslavement of Korean women during the Second World War, said Seoul's foreign ministry on Thursday.

The ninth round of talks about 'comfort women', a euphemism for women forced into sex slaves for the Imperial Japan's military brothels during its 1910-45 colonisation of the Korean Peninsula, will be held for the first time in about three months, Xinhua reported.

Lee Sang-deok, director-general of Northeast Asian affairs bureau at South Korea's foreign ministry, flew to Tokyo for talks with Junichi Ihara, director-general of the Japanese foreign ministry's Asian and Oceanian affairs bureau.

South Korea called for Japan to sincerely apologise for and compensate for the wartime sexual brutalities, but Japan claimed that all issues on sexual slavery were already resolved with the 1965 treaty that normalised diplomatic ties between Seoul and Tokyo.

During the previous round held in Tokyo in June, South Korea and Japan allegedly narrowed down differences on the 'comfort women' issue, but they had yet to reach a full agreement.

(IANS)