South Korean President Park Geun-hye has met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for the first time in eight months, an official said, a rare move amid lingering tensions over history-related issues.

Abe has been pushing to set up a summit with Park to try to repair frayed bilateral relations over historical disputes stemming from Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.

Park and Abe also agreed to encourage their officials to move forward their talks on the sensitive issue of elderly Korean women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japan's World War II soldiers, presidential spokesman Min Kyung-wook said.

South Korea and Japan have held four rounds of director-general level talks on the sex slaves, but no progress has been made.

The encounter came as Park was seated next to Abe at a banquet hosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday evening for Asia-Pacific leaders who came to Beijing for their annual summit.

Park and Abe also discussed various pending issues between the two countries, Min said, without elaborating.

The development came hours after Xi met with Abe on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Beijing. China and Japan have long been at odds over a territorial dispute in East China Sea. Japan controlled much of China in the early part of the 20th century.

Park's meeting with Abe also came four days after Abe again proposed a summit with Park, the latest in a series of his conciliatory gestures toward Park in recent months.

Park had so far shunned a summit with Abe bilaterally, and one of the most knotty issues is Korean sex slaves, commonly called "comfort women."

Seoul-Tokyo relations have plunged to one of their worst levels in recent years, largely over the issue of the sex slaves and Japan's repeated territorial claims to South Korea's easternmost islets of Dokdo.

Historians estimate that up to 200,000 Asian women, mostly Koreans, were forced into sexual servitude for Japan's World War II soldiers.

Park met with Abe in a trilateral summit with U.S. President Barack Obama on the sidelines of a nuclear security summit in the Netherlands in March. (Yonhap)