SEOUL, South Korea -- More than 70 years after the end of World War II, South Korea and Japan reached a landmark agreement on Monday to resolve their dispute over Korean women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japan's Imperial Army.
The agreement, in which Japan made an apology and promised an $8.3 million payment, was intended to remove one of the most intractable logjams in relations between South Korea and Japan, both crucial allies to the United States. The so-called comfort women have been the most painful legacy of Japan's colonial rule of Korea, which lasted from 1910 until Japan's World War II defeat in 1945.
The Japanese and South Korean foreign ministers, announcing the agreement in Seoul, said each side considered it a "final and irrevocable resolution" of the issue.
The deal won praise from the governing party of President Park Geun-hye of South Korea but was immediately criticized as insufficient by some of the surviving former sex slaves as well as opposition politicians in South Korea, where anti-Japanese sentiments run deep.
The United States has repeatedly urged Japan and South Korea to resolve the dispute, a stumbling block in U.S. efforts to strengthen a joint front with its Asian allies to better cope with China's growing assertiveness in the region, as well as North Korea's attempt to build a nuclear arsenal.
"The Japanese government bears a heartfelt responsibility for the comfort women issue, which severely injured the honor and dignity of many women, with the involvement of its military," the foreign minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, said on Monday, reading the agreement at a news conference in Seoul.
Kishida also said his boss, the hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, had expressed "apologies and remorse from his heart for all those who suffered many pains and scars that are difficult to heal physically and mentally."
Abe later called Park to deliver the same apologies, Park's office said.
"I hope that the two countries will cooperate closely to build trust based on this agreement and open a new relationship," she was quoted as telling Abe. Park, who had refused to hold a summit meeting with Abe until last month, has repeatedly urged Japan to address the grievances of comfort women before the neighbors can improve ties.
Although Japan had previously apologized, including in a 1993 statement that acknowledged responsibility for the practice, the agreement on Monday signaled a compromise for Abe.
As recently as last year, under pressure from his right wing to scrap the apology, Abe and his conservative political allies agreed to review the evidence that led to it.
Under the agreement, the Japanese government will give the $8.3 million to a foundation that the South Korean government will establish to offer services to the women.
That Tokyo will provide money directly from the national budget is a potentially significant departure. A previous fund created after the 1993 apology, the Asian Women's Fund, relied on private donors and was never fully accepted in South Korea. Although 60 former comfort women from South Korea had received financial aid from the fund, many others refused to accept it.
Japan also won an important concession from Seoul, a promise not to criticize Tokyo over the comfort women again.
Historians say at least tens of thousands of women, many of them Korean, were lured or coerced to work at brothels from the early 1930s until the end of World War II. The Korean women who survived the war had lived mostly in silence because of the stigma, until some of them began speaking out in the early 1990s.
A total of 238 former comfort women have since come forward in South Korea, but only 46 are still living, most of them in their 80s and 90s.
Initial reactions to the resolution from former comfort women in South Korea were far from welcoming.
"The agreement does not reflect the views of former comfort women," said Lee Yong-soo, 88, during a news conference held after the agreement was announced. "I will ignore it completely."
She said the deal fell far short of the women's longstanding demand that Japan admit legal responsibility and offer formal reparations.
"We are not craving for money," she said. "What we demand is that Japan make official reparations for the crime it had committed."
She said she also opposed the removal of a statue of a girl symbolizing comfort women that a civic group established in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul in 2011. During negotiations, Japan insisted that South Korea remove the statue, and South Korea said Monday that it would discuss the matter with the former sex slaves.
Japan has maintained that all legal issues stemming from its colonial rule of Korea were resolved with the 1965 treaty that normalized relations between the two countries. Negotiators from both nations forged a compromise with the vaguely worded agreement on Monday, which did not clarify whether the responsibility that the Japanese government acknowledged was legal or moral. Kishida made it clear on Monday that the money Japan was offering was not legal reparation.
The deal was announced after Kishida met with his South Korean counterpart, Yun Byung-se, in Seoul. Their meeting came after 12 rounds of negotiations that the two governments have held since spring 2014 to narrow their gaps on the dispute.
Yun and Kishida said they hoped that the deal would open a "new phase" in bilateral ties, long strained over historical disputes stemming from colonial rule. They also said that Seoul and Tokyo would refrain from criticizing each other over the issue at the United Nations and elsewhere.
Tsuneo Watanabe, a senior fellow at the Tokyo Foundation, a research group, said Abe had chosen a pragmatic approach that elevated economic and security ties over the bristly historical revisionism he has sometimes championed.
"Team Abe is basically realist, though Abe himself has sometimes veered from that," Watanabe said.
Stable relations with South Korea, he added, were vital to Abe's most cherished foreign policy goal: nurturing alliances to counter the growing power of China. "Ultimately, Abe believes in the balance of power."
But Hiroka Shoji, a researcher on East Asia at Amnesty International, said the agreement should not be the end of the road in securing justice for the former sex slaves.
"The women were missing from the negotiation table, and they must not be sold short in a deal that is more about political expediency than justice," she said. "Until the women get the full and unreserved apology from the Japanese government for the crimes committed against them, the fight for justice goes on."
Jonathan Soble contributed reporting from Nagano, Japan.