The leaders of South Korea and Japan agreed to accelerate efforts to mend ties frayed over Japan’s past colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula as they held their countries’ first summit in nearly three years on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, both governments announced yesterday.
The meeting occurred after Tokyo denied Seoul’s earlier announcement they had agreed on the summit, in a sign of the delicate nature of their current relations.
During their 30-minute meeting on Wednesday in New York, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida shared the need to improve bilateral ties and agreed to instruct their respective diplomats to step up talks for that, Yoon’s office said in a statement.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Kishida’s office confirmed the meeting.
A separate Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement said the two leaders agreed to promote cooperation between the two countries as well as with the US.
It said the leaders shared the need to restore sound relations.
Yoon’s office said the two leaders also jointly expressed serious concerns about North Korea’s recent legislation authorizing the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons in certain conditions and the North’s reported moves to conduct its first nuclear test in five years.
The Japanese foreign ministry said Kishida and Yoon agreed to further cooperate in their response to North Korea.
The South Korean and Japanese governments said Yoon and Kishida agreed to continue communications between them.
However, it was not immediately known how meaningful the two leaders’ conversation in New York was to address major sticking points in bilateral ties that suffered their biggest setback in recent years when the two countries were governed by their predecessors.
In 2018, South Korea’s top court ruled that two Japanese companies — Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries — must compensate Koreans who had been forced to work during Japan’s 1910-1945 colonial occupation.
The companies and the Japanese government have dismissed the rulings, arguing that all compensation issues were already settled under a 1965 treaty that normalized bilateral ties, and included Tokyo’s provision of hundreds of millions of US dollars to Seoul in economic assistance and loans.
The dispute prompted the two governments to downgrade each other’s trade status and South Korea to threaten to abandon an intelligence-sharing deal.
Former Korean forced laborers and their supporters, for their part, pushed for the forced sales of the Japanese companies’ assets in South Korea.
It is unclear if Wednesday’s summit would yield progress in efforts to improve bilateral ties, as some of the former forced laborers in the court cases maintain that Japanese companies must first consent to the South Korean court rulings if they want to resolve the legal disputes.
The strained ties have complicated a US push to bolster its trilateral security alliance with Seoul and Tokyo — two of its key regional allies where it deploys a total of 80,000 troops — to better deal with rising Chinese influence and North Korean nuclear threats.
On Wednesday, US President Joe Biden met Yoon and Kishida separately on the margins of the UN General Assembly.
In their talks, Biden and Yoon reaffirmed their commitment to strengthen their countries’ military alliance, and ensure close cooperation to address the North Korean threat.
Biden and Kishida discussed the importance of advancing a free and open Indo-Pacific, emphasizing the importance of strengthening and modernizing their security alliance, the White House said.
South Korea and Japan have been seeking better ties since Yoon’s inauguration in May. The Yoon-Kishida meeting was the first summit between the countries since December 2019, when then-South Korean president Moon Jae-in and then-Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe met in China on the sidelines of a South Korea-Japan-China summit.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
CONFIDENCE BOOSTER: ’After parkour ... you dare to do a lot of things that you think only young people can do,’ a 67-year-old parkour enthusiast said In a corner of suburban Singapore, Betty Boon vaults a guardrail, crawls underneath a slide, executes forward shoulder rolls and scales a steep slope, finishing the course to applause. “Good job,” the 69-year-old’s coach cheers. This is “geriatric parkour,” where about 20 retirees learned to tackle a series of relatively demanding exercises, building their agility and enjoying a sense of camaraderie. Boon, an upbeat grandmother, said learning parkour has aided her confidence and independence as she ages. “When you’re weak, you will be dependent on someone,” she said after sweating it out with her parkour classmates in suburban Toa Payoh,
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen (高兟), famous for making provocative satirical sculptures of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), was tried on Monday over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs,” his wife and a rights group said. Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, said his wife, Zhao Yaliang (趙雅良), and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group which operates outside the nation. The closed-door, one-day trial took place at Sanhe City People’s Court in Hebei Province neighboring the capital, Beijing, and ended without a
RSS