After an extended period of glacial diplomatic mistrust, there are signs that South Korea and Japan, with prodding from their mutual US military ally, are making genuine, albeit hesitant, moves toward normalization.
The biggest step could come in a matter of weeks, with South Korean President Park Geun-hye signaling she might hold a long-avoided summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
During her four-day official visit to the US, Park in Washington on Thursday said that she is open to a sit-down with Abe on the sidelines of a trilateral leadership dialogue being held with China in Seoul.
“I can have such a meeting with him,” said Park, who has resolutely refused summit overtures from Japan since taking office nearly three years ago — until now.
Relations between the neighbors have never been easy — clouded by sensitive, historical disputes related to Japan’s 1910-1945 colonial rule over the Korean Peninsula and, in particular, the issue of “comfort women” forcibly recruited to work in Japanese wartime military brothels.
Park has been particularly forceful in insisting that Tokyo has yet to properly atone for colonial-era abuses, and alluded to the issue again in her remarks in Washington.
For a summit with Abe to be “meaningful,” timely progress is needed on the comfort women issue, Park said, adding that only 47 of the women are still alive.
Japan maintains that the issue was settled in a 1965 normalization agreement, which saw Tokyo make a total payment of US$800 million in grants or loans to its former colony.
Further complicating rapprochement efforts is a bitter territorial dispute over a group of tiny South Korean-controlled islands, known in Korean as Dokdo and Takeshima in Japan, which lie between the two nations.
Park’s shift of tone is likely because of US pressure for both countries to try and put their differences behind them, or at least shelve them to deal with more pressing issues.
South Korea and Japan are key US military allies in Asia, and Washington has barely concealed its impatience with a diplomatic rift it sees as weakening joint efforts to contain an increasingly assertive China.
“Park took a hardline, and domestically very popular stance on the comfort women issue from the start of her administration, but under White House prompting, she now seems to be moving, perhaps half-heartedly, towards a position of compromise,” said Kim Keun-sik, an international relations expert at Kyungnam University in Changwon, South Korea.
South Korea and Japan are major trading partners, and economic exchanges have largely continued throughout the diplomatic freeze, along with practical defense cooperation.
Ahead of the trilateral leadership dialogue, the South Korean Ministers of Defense Han Min-koo and Japanese Minister of Defense Gen Nakatani are to meet in Seoul next week.
The two men last met in Singapore in May for what was the first bilateral defense ministry dialogue in four years.
As well as discussions on improving a united stance against the nuclear threat from North Korea, Nakatani is to brief Han on the passage of new laws broadening the role of the Japanese military — legislation that has caused some consternation in Seoul.
The trilateral summits with China were initiated in 2008 and held annually until 2012, when they were suspended after Seoul-Tokyo relations went into one of their tailspins.
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