S. Korea FM meets Japanese counterpart on first official visit

TOKYO, Japan (UPDATED) – South Korea and Japan have agreed to work towards holding a joint leaders’ summit, their foreign ministers said after meeting in Tokyo Sunday, June 21, despite current strains over history and territory.

South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-Se was on his first official visit to Tokyo to mark 50 years of diplomatic relations and hold talks with his Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida.

During the meeting, the two agreed to strive for a summit between the two nations “at an appropriate time,” a Japanese foreign official said.

Dialogue between South Korea and Japan would continue despite the fact that “difficult problems exist between the two countries”, Kishida told reporters after the talks.

“It was a meaningful meeting,” he added.

On Monday, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will attend a ceremony with Yun in Tokyo to celebrate half a century since relations between the countries were normalized.

South Korean President Park Geun-Hye will attend a similar ceremony in Seoul, according to local media.

Park has previously maintained there can be no meeting between them until Japan makes amends for its wartime system of sex slavery, which saw as many as 200,000 mostly South Korean “comfort women” forced into servitude for Japan’s Imperial military.

“I conveyed South Korea’s clear position on the military comfort women issue,” Yun said after Sunday’s talks without elaborating, South Korea’s Yonghap news agency reported.

Park said in a recent interview with the Washington Post that “there has been considerable progress on the issue of the comfort women” and the two countries were “in the final stage” of Tokyo-Seoul negotiations.

Japan maintains that the issue was settled in the 1965 normalization agreement, which saw Tokyo make a total payment of $800 million in grants or loans to its former colony.

The Japanese government also issued a formal apology in 1993, which remains official policy.

Japan, China and South Korea are separately considering holding a trilateral meeting later this year, seen as a possible opportunity for Abe and Park to hold their first summit.

Japan and South Korea are also at odds over ownership of the sparsely-populated Dokdo islets, which sit in the Sea of Japan (East Sea) and are controlled by Seoul. Tokyo claims them under the name Takeshima. – Rappler.com