[Editorial] Park-Abe talks in fall?

Kim Kyou-hyun, first vice foreign minister, is set to visit Tokyo on Wednesday. He is returning the Seoul visit by his counterpart, Akitaka Saiki, last week.

Normally, the exchange of visits by South Korean and Japanese vice foreign ministers would not draw much public attention. But this time it does, because it may turn out to be the first step toward fence-mending.

South Korean-Japanese relations have deteriorated since Shinzo Abe, a right-wing historical revisionist, was inaugurated as Japan’s prime minister last December.

Abe has since provoked the South with his controversial remarks on Japan’s wartime atrocities. He has said his government does not necessary support the 1995 statement by his predecessor, Tomiichi Murayama, of apology for Japan’s wartime actions against its neighbors during World War II. He has also said he would review an earlier Japanese statement of apology to “comfort women,” those women that were forced into Japan’s wartime brothels.

True, Abe has attempted to tone down those remarks in one way or another. But the damage has already been done to Japan’s relations with South Korea. To make the matter worse, his government has repeatedly laid claim to South Korea’s rocky islets in the East Sea, Dokdo. No wonder bilateral relations have worsened enough to delay a scheduled summit indefinitely.

Shortly after she was inaugurated in February, President Park Geun-hye had intended to meet Abe in late May after holding talks with U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington, D.C., earlier in the month. But she found it impossible to go ahead with her plan for talks with Abe when he said in April that his government did not necessarily uphold the Murayama statement. He went one step further when he claimed the word “invasion” had no definition that was firmly established, either internationally or academically.

Angered by his remarks, Park ignored a diplomatic convention a new South Korean president was supposed to follow ― holding talks with the Japanese prime minister after a summit with the U.S. president. She skipped her visit to Tokyo and went to Beijing last month for talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

When the Park-Abe talks were postponed in May, it was assumed they would be held in fall. Now that prediction is impossible, with Park wondering what good would come out of her talks with Abe, who is continuing to rub salt into the wound that colonial Japan inflicted on Korea. Park told Korean senior journalists last week that a summit would be meaningless if the Abe government stayed the current course.

Still, it does not necessarily mean that fence-mending is out of the question. It would not serve the interests of Japan to drive an angry Korea closer to China. As such, it should not come as a surprise if the first vice foreign minister’s mission in Tokyo includes discussing a Park-Abe summit.