Top diplomats of Korea, Japan to meet in New York

The foreign ministers of Korea and Japan were to hold talks in New York on Thursday as the two countries seek to restore relations that are at their lowest ebb in decades.

Yun Byung-se and Fumio Kishida will meet on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. They also had consultations last month at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Myanmar.

The two diplomats will discuss bilateral ties, the situation on the Korean Peninsula and other regional issues, according to Seoul’s Foreign Ministry.

“Their meeting is natural, especially since it will take place during a multilateral event. They also met last year on the same occasion. Though the relationship is not in good shape, we have been working with Japan in various areas at all levels except for a summit,” a Seoul official said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

Yun is forecast to call for Japan to make concessions for the sake of ongoing negotiations designed to explore ways to end the long-festering feud over Japan’s sexual enslavement of Korean women during World War II.

Kishida, for his part, may stress the need for a fence-mending summit between President Park Geun-hye and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. With the Abe administration escalating historical and territorial tension, Park has been shunning a bilateral meeting with him, while holding talks with the leaders of the U.S. and China several times.

Abe has openly expressed his desire to meet Park. Most recently he delivered a letter through former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, who visited her early this month, proposing a summit on the sidelines of an international forum such as APEC or ASEM later this year.

Though the comfort women issue remains the biggest stumbling block, hopes are growing for a long-awaited thaw in relations. Seoul has been sending out reconciliatory signals in recent weeks in search of ways to reset bilateral ties, which were normalized almost 50 years ago.

Early this month, Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se held his first one-on-one talks with Japanese Ambassador Koro Bessho on the margins of a joint cultural event.

Seoul also engineered the first trilateral deputy-minister-level dialogue with Tokyo and Beijing since November, during which the sides agreed to work together for a foreign ministers’ meeting soon and eventually a summit.

In another sign of rapprochement, Park did not give much weight to the comfort women issue in her speech to the General Assembly on Wednesday, simply addressing it in the context of sexual violence against women during armed conflicts as a “clear violation of human rights and humanitarian norms.”

By Shin Hyon-hee (heeshin@heraldcorp.com)