It has always been challenging for a South Korean president to host a visiting Japanese prime minister. It will be the same when President Moon Jae-in receives Shinzo Abe in Seoul in about two weeks.

The Japanese leader will be coming to Korea to attend the opening ceremony of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. This normally be a ceremonial, goodwill event, but a reignited feud over the “comfort women” issue and the North Korean nuclear crisis threaten to make Abe’s visit more of a diplomatic challenge.

In fact, Abe made many Koreans furl their brows when he indicated his intention to link a visit to Korea with the World War II sex slavery issue, which has flared up again recently.

This attitude ran counter to the international norm that calls on leaders to pay respect to and congratulate their neighbors when they host big international events like the Olympics.

Moreover, Japan, along with South Korea and China, is a key Asian member of the Olympic family. Its capital, Tokyo, hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics and the country has staged the Winter Olympics twice, in 1972 and 1998. Tokyo will host its second Summer Games in 2020.

The fact that Chinese President Xi Jinping, who will host next Winter Olympics in Beijing in 2022, will attend the closing ceremony in PyeongChang, would also make Abe’s absence in PyeongChang look awkward.

All in all, it is fortunate Abe decided to come to PyeongChang and hold summit talks with Moon.

The two leaders have already met twice, but the upcoming talks bear additional importance because it will be Abe’s first visit to Korea in more than two years. The hiatus in the “shuttle diplomacy” between the leaders of the two countries symbolizes how bad relations have become in recent years.

It is against this backdrop that the forthcoming talks should provide momentum for the two leaders and their countries to improve relations.

Both Moon and Abe need to exercise prudence, especially over the sex slavery issue, which came to the fore again in the wake of the Seoul government’s challenge to the 2015 agreement the Abe government signed with the previous Park Geun-hye administration.

True, there are some grounds for Japanese protest, in that the Moon administration is trying to tamper with a government-level accord made with a foreign government. But Abe also should be reminded that few in the international community would agree that the 2015 accord was enough for Japan to fully atone for the atrocities it committed against Korean women.

Given past experiences, it would be difficult for Moon and Abe to reach a full compromise in their upcoming talks. Moon has already said that the 2015 agreement was flawed because it did not reflect the views of victims, and that the Seoul government would do what it can, short of tearing the agreement up or demanding a renegotiation.

For his part, Abe said he would tell Moon that the Japanese government will not accept any challenge or change to the agreement. He also said he would push for the removal of statues symbolizing the victims of his country’s World War II military sex slavery.

Any such hard-line stance -- perhaps Abe is well aware that Moon would be unable to accept these demands -- would make it harder for the two leaders to use the meeting to bring their relations back to normal.

Historical issues between Korea and Japan cannot be resolved in one round or several rounds of meetings between the two sides. In that sense, Moon and Abe could resort to some sort of “strategic ambiguity” regarding the comfort women issue. In short, they could separate the dispute over sex slavery from other bilateral issues.

We urge them to do so because the two leaders have to work together closely to tackle a more urgent, critical issue -- the North Korean nuclear crisis, which may exacerbate again after the PyeongChang Olympics, despite the sudden thaw in relations between South and North Korea.