The top diplomats for China, South Korea and Japan are to meet in Tokyo this weekend for talks, Seoul said yesterday, as the neighbors move to bolster regional ties.
South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs Cho Tae-yul and his Japanese and Chinese counterparts, Iwaya Takeshi and Wang Yi (王毅), are to “exchange comprehensive views ... for the development of trilateral cooperation,” Seoul’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
The meeting in Tokyo on Saturday will be the 11th trilateral ministerial meeting, the statement said, with the last such meeting held in November 2023 in the South Korean port city of Busan.
Photo: AFP
The countries are also to hold bilateral talks on the sidelines of the three-way summit, Seoul added.
Japanese public broadcaster NHK said the meeting was “expected to discuss concrete cooperation in a wide range of areas, such as people-to-people exchanges, economic cooperation and measures to combat the falling birthrate.”
The top diplomats were also set “to agree to coordinate the holding of a summit meeting of the three countries by the end of the year.”
NHK said Tokyo also aims to resolve some outstanding bilateral issues, “ such as China’s measures to suspend imports of Japanese fisheries products.”
In May last year, the leaders of the three countries held a rare summit in Seoul — the first such high level talks in five years — at which they agreed to deepen trade ties.
The three countries also reaffirmed their commitment to the “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” — a reference to nuclear-armed North Korea.
Seoul and Tokyo typically take a stronger line against Pyongyang than does China, which remains one of North Korea’s most important allies and economic benefactors, despite leader Kim Jong-un’s recent moves to bolster ties with historic ally Russia.
Beijing has previously resisted condemning Pyongyang for its weapons tests, instead criticizing joint US-South Korea drills for raising tension.
Seoul and Washington accuse Pyongyang of sending thousands of North Korean soldiers to help Russia fight its war against Ukraine, in return for technical assistance from Moscow for its banned weapons programs.
Experts say any moves by Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing to ramp up trilateral cooperation and boost economic ties augers well for future agreements on more difficult topics like Kim’s nuclear weapons.
The announcement comes as South Korea awaits a Constitutional Court’s ruling on whether to remove President Yoon Suk-yeol from office over his botched martial law declaration in December.
While in office, Yoon has pushed for closer ties with Japan, attempting to bury the historical hatchet to present a united trilateral front with the US against North Korea’s growing military provocations.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS