South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol will meet Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida next week in Japan, his cabinet announced on Thursday, as the two countries try to ease tensions inherited from Japanese colonization.
This visit, scheduled for March 16 and 17, comes after Seoul presented a compensation plan for South Koreans who were victims of forced labor during the Japanese occupation (1910-1945), which does not involve financial participation. directly from Tokyo or the Japanese companies concerned.
Relaunch exchanges
The meeting will "
revive bilateral summit exchanges between South Korea and Japan, which have been suspended for 12 years, and mark an important step in improving and developing relations"
between the two countries, the cabinet said. by Yoon Suk Yeol.
The president's office, which specified that the invitation came from Tokyo, said it hoped that this meeting would overcome an "
unfortunate
" historical past.
A Japanese government spokesman, Hirokazu Matsuno, said close exchanges had taken place since Yoon Suk Yeol came to power in March 2022, calling South Korea an "important neighbour
"
.
With this visit, Japan wants to deepen bilateral relations "
based on friendship and cooperation that have been in operation since the normalization of relations
", he told reporters.
Read also“The demographic collapse of Japan weakens this country in the face of China”
However, the dispute inherited from Japanese colonization continues to divide Seoul and Tokyo, two Washington allies who face threats from North Korea, which has nuclear weapons.
The Korean peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule for 35 years, during which time around 780,000 Koreans were reduced to forced labor, according to data from Seoul.
Tens of thousands of women have been used as sex slaves.
During colonization, Koreans were forbidden to speak their language in school and had to take Japanese names.
Japan believes that this dispute was settled in 1965, when bilateral relations were normalized, in particular via a package of 800 million dollars in loans and financial aid granted by Tokyo to Seoul.
South Korea's compensation plan, hailed by its neighbor and by Washington, has sparked outrage among many South Koreans, including those who were forced to work for Japanese companies during World War II.
SEE
ALSO -
Another failure for the Japanese H3 space launcher, self-destruct order
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/KMEYMJKESBAZBE4MRBAM4TGHIQ.jpg)
