South Korea and Japan should launch a scholarly forum to bridge wide gaps in public perceptions in the two countries of Japan's wartime sexual slavery so as to realize a genuine reconcilation, a South Korean scholar said Monday.

Park Yu-ha, a professor of Seoul's Sejong University, made the remark during a seminar in Washington, calling last month's landmark agreement between Seoul and Tokyo on resolving the so-called "comfort women" issue only a "political settlement."

"I hope that a consultative forum will be formed as early as possible to open the way for turning the political settlement at the end of 2015 into a historical resolution that is acceptable to peoples of the two countries," Park said during the Wilson Center seminar.

Park is known for her controversial book, "Comfort Women of the Empire," which has been accused by victims and other critics of disputing the coerciveness of the "comfort women" system. She has also been indicted on charges of defaming victims.

In Monday's seminar, Park claimed that the proposed forum should focus on a few key contentious points, including whether the Japanese military was involved in physically taking victims away for sexual servitude and the roles of "collaborators."

The professor stressed the importance of the role of collaborators in the comfort women system, saying that even if a state comes up with a bad policy, it cannot be implemented without collaborators.

"Discussing the role of these collaborators is necessary not only to prevent the recurrence of the same incident but also to think fundamentally about state responsibility," she said.

But Alexis Dudden, a University of Connecticut professor known for her efforts to get Japan to face up to historical facts about the sexual slavery, stressed that the scale of the crime makes it impossible to be carried out by anyone other than a state.

"These are not isolated or sporadic crimes, but instead crimes of such magnitude and breadth and scope that they could only be carried out through coordinated government policy or by governing officials," the professor said during the seminar.

"This crime took place on such a wide scale only because of state sponsorship, orgnaization and perpetration through orders to construct the stations, through orders to procure bodies, through orders to traffick the bodies across international borders, many times on military transport ships and trucks, through orders about pricing systems, and through orders about medical procedures," Dudden said. (Yonhap)