Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will go to Seoul this weekend as the 2 international locations search to bury historic animosities and reboot their relationship within the face of a rising menace from North Korea.
The two-day journey beginning Sunday would be the first official bilateral go to to Seoul by a Japanese chief for over a decade.
Kishida will meet with President Yoon Suk Yeol — who has made resetting ties with Japan a high precedence — simply weeks after the South Korean chief visited Tokyo in March.
Yoon has additionally simply returned from a state go to to Washington, the place he met President Joe Biden and signed an accord geared toward boosting the nuclear safety afforded to South Korea by the United States.
Relations between Seoul and Tokyo — each key regional US safety allies — have lengthy been strained over Japan’s brutal 1910-45 colonial occupation of the Korean peninsula, together with the imposition of compelled labour and sexual slavery.
But Yoon, who took workplace final 12 months, has sought to bury the historic hatchet, earlier saying a plan to compensate Korean victims of Japanese compelled labour regardless of the absence of any direct involvement from Tokyo.
His endgame is bettering regional safety to counter perceived threats from North Korea, specialists say.
“The Korea-Japan relationship is known as the weakest link in the trilateral cooperation with the United States,” mentioned Choi Eunmi, a researcher on the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul.
“So when this part is strengthened, it can eventually advance into proper South Korea-US-Japan cooperation.”
‘WAR PLOT’
Efforts to spice up army cooperation come as North Korea’s chief Kim Jong Un, who final 12 months declared his nation an “irreversible” nuclear energy, doubles down on weapons improvement and testing.
Pyongyang has performed a record-breaking string of launches in 2023, together with test-firing the nation’s first solid-fuel ballistic missile — a technical breakthrough.
The United States and South Korea have in flip been ramping up their defence cooperation, staging a collection of main army workouts together with two trilateral drills involving Japan this 12 months.
But they’re desirous to do extra. At their summit final month, Biden and Yoon issued the Washington Declaration, which bolsters the US nuclear umbrella over South Korea, they usually vowed to hurry up trilateral cooperation with Japan.
North Korea views all such cooperation as “absolutely identical with a dangerous war plot”, in line with a commentary carried by the nation’s official KCNA news company.
BEYOND THE ‘TURBULENCE’
The Japanese prime minister mentioned this week that his journey to Seoul would “give momentum to ‘shuttle diplomacy'” between the neighbours.
During their March summit in Tokyo, Kishida and Yoon agreed to finish tit-for-tat commerce curbs and restart mutual visits, with Kishida additionally inviting the South Korean president to a G7 meet in Hiroshima this month.
“The exchange of summits, first in Japan and now in Korea, is meant to signify the turbulence of the recent past is behind South Korea and Japan,” Benjamin A. Engel, analysis professor on the Institute of International Affairs at Seoul National University, instructed AFP.
In 2018, often-testy ties between the 2 international locations deteriorated additional after South Korea’s Supreme Court ordered Japanese corporations to compensate the wartime victims of compelled labour.
But in March this 12 months Seoul introduced a plan to pay these affected with out Tokyo’s direct involvement — a transfer that enraged a lot of the South Korean public.
A Gallup Korea ballot printed in the identical month confirmed practically 60 % of respondents have been against the federal government’s proposal.
As lengthy as normal sentiment in South Korea stays bitter in the direction of Japan, the present diplomatic bonhomie dangers being “short-lived”, mentioned Engel.
“If the US does have a positive role to play, it should be to lean on Tokyo to show more remorse towards Korea,” he added.
Should Kishida’s journey go effectively — with Japanese media suggesting he’ll reaffirm Tokyo’s earlier apologies over wartime conduct — it might herald the beginning of a brand new degree of engagement.
“The success of the visit will be measured by how there will be regular meetings and engagement between the two countries at the leadership level,” Shihoko Goto, deputy director of the Asia Program on the Wilson Center in Washington, instructed AFP.
“The challenge will be whether public opinion in both countries will support such overtures.”
Source: www.anews.com.tr
