The brewing currency war between South Korea and Japan in the wake of Tokyo’s decision to increase monetary stimulus may add to the strain already put on ties between the two countries by prolonged disputes over historical issues.
This will not help form the atmosphere for setting up the first bilateral summit between President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Since taking office in February last year, Park has shunned one-on-one talks with the Japanese leader, who has pushed for a revisionist agenda since he retook his post in December 2012.
Abe has repeatedly conveyed his willingness to meet Park through Japanese politicians and officials visiting Seoul in recent months. But his message has fallen short of convincing the South Korean president that their meeting will produce any substantial outcome. Park is apparently concerned that her talks with Abe would only give the Japanese leader a pretext for continuing to pursue his revisionist course.
The two leaders are set to attend a string of multilateral summits later this month. Their failure to meet bilaterally on the sidelines of these gatherings, during which they are scheduled to hold a flurry of one-on-one talks with other leaders, would be yet another vivid indication of the chilly relations between the two neighboring countries.
Park is to meet separately with Chinese President Xi Jinping during the Nov. 10-11 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in Beijing and her U.S. counterpart Barack Obama during the Nov. 12-13 East Asia Summit in Naypyidaw, Myanmar, or during the Nov. 15-16 summit of the Group of 20 major economies in Brisbane, Australia. The talks will be her fifth and fourth one-on-one meetings respectively with the Chinese and U.S. leaders since her inauguration as president.
With Obama and Xi planning to hold bilateral talks on the sidelines of the APEC summit, the three leaders are set to coordinate their stance on how to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programs and work toward regional cooperation and peace. In this setting of successive discussions, the lack of a bilateral meeting between Park and Abe would loom large.
A South Korean diplomatic source said this week it would “not be easy” for Park and Abe to meet bilaterally at the upcoming APEC conference. The two leaders should work harder to realize bilateral talks to help repair the frayed ties. Abe is required to be more forward-looking, especially toward solving the issue of Korean women forced into sexual servitude for Japanese troops during World War II. Park needs to be more flexible and practical on bilateral discussions with Abe, which will be essential for pushing ahead with her vision for inter-Korean unification and regional cooperation and peace.
It would certainly impose a heavy political burden for the two a leaders to visit each other’s countries at the moment, with many thorny pending issues unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. They should be more serious about holding bilateral talks at the upcoming multilateral gatherings, especially if they feel that the frosty relations between the two nations should not continue into next year, when Seoul and Tokyo mark the 50th anniversary of normalizing ties.
