Japan, South Korea move past differences as Yoon flies to Tokyo

By Riyaz ul Khaliq

ISTANBUL (AA) - In an apparent warming up of bilateral ties, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Thursday flew to Japan for a two-day official trip, the first by the country’s head of state since 2011.

Yoon met with Fumio Kishida, the prime minister of Japan, in Tokyo, and the two will hold their first bilateral summit in four years.

The top-level exchange between the two Asian nations comes after years of bilateral conflicts rooted in wartime disputes that have impacted diplomatic, trade, and people-to-people ties.

The two leaders are expected to discuss North Korea, China, and supply chains, besides bilateral issues.

As Tokyo and Seoul appear to move past their differences, Pyongyang Thursday launched an intercontinental ballistic missile eastward, triggering condemnation from Seoul, Tokyo, and the US.

Ahead of his trip to Tokyo, Seoul decided to drop its demand for settlement with Japanese firms to solve the decades-long issue of war-time forced labor and sexual exploitation. Instead, a public foundation in Seoul will pay compensation to the victims.

Yoon has pledged to “faithfully implement the solution,” according to Tokyo-based Kyodo News.

As the two Asian nations move to mend ties, businesses from the two nations announced Thursday that they will “establish a foundation to promote exchanges between the youth of their respective countries.”

Tokyo has also agreed to end export controls on trade items with Seoul as South Korea will withdraw its complaint against Japan at World Trade Organization.

Tokyo and Seoul are also expected to resume a bilateral security dialogue, halted for the past five years.

"It is aimed at boosting cooperation at a time of repeated ballistic missile launches by North Korea," Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported.

It was in 2019 that then-South Korean President Moon Jae-in visited Japan to attend a G-20 summit in Osaka.

However, no bilateral meeting was held by the two sides.

Meanwhile, as the US ramps up its efforts to widen its alliance at the military and trade levels against China’s expanding influence in the wider Asia-Pacific, Tokyo, Seoul and Washington have reportedly held over 40 trilateral meetings at different levels over the past year.

- 'S.Korea-Japan relations haunted by US perspective’

History issues have long “haunted South Korea-Japan relations and from the US perspective, undermined the trilateral alliance against the region's challenges facing them all,” Jingdong Yuan, an international affairs scholar at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), told Anadolu via email.

On an optimistic note, Yuan, however, said Yoon’s trip is a signal that the two countries are “willing to move forward and not allow the history to derail their cooperation in responding to more imminent threats to their security.”

“It is made possible, obviously by President Yoon's decision to move beyond the past, with his March 1 speech clearly setting out South Korea's approach to managing its relationship with Japan, characterizing the latter as a country no longer a colonizer but one sharing many democratic values with South Korea and one upholding the rules-based order in the region,” he explained.

He said the South Korean court’s decision on “how the forced labor should be compensated also helps to disentangle this specific issue from the overall bilateral relationship.”

In response to a question about the potential focus of the bilateral summit, Yuan said the South Korean president “will place more emphasis on how Seoul and Tokyo can cooperate in responding to the many challenges but will refrain from singling out China as the reason why the two countries are coming together."

"They will be more explicit on the North Korea threats to their and the region's security even though Seoul will not rule out completely approaches to diplomatic management of—and possible solutions to the nuclear issue."