South Korea and Japan plan to resume their strategic dialogue ― stalled for over a year and a half ― next month as they explore ways to mend relations severely dented by feuds over wartime history, a news report said Wednesday.
The talks will take place in Tokyo on Oct. 1 between Vice Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yong and his Japanese counterpart Akitaka Saiki, Kyodo News reported. The meeting was last held in January 2013 and will be the first since President Park Geun-hye and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took office, though the two diplomats have met before.
The sides will trade views on the current bilateral relationship, the situation on the Korean Peninsula and their joint efforts to counter North Korean threats, the report said. They are also expected to discuss ways to expedite the ongoing negotiations over Japan’s sexual enslavement of Korean women during World War II, which have been moving at a snail’s pace since they started in April.
A Seoul official said that no date has been fixed, though the two countries have recently been looking to restart the strategic talks.
“Basically the director-general talks (on the sex slavery issue) need not be linked with the strategic dialogue,” a Foreign Ministry official said on customary condition of anonymity.
The vice-ministerial consultations were initiated in 2005 with the goal of boosting cooperation on not only pressing bilateral issues but also regional and global conundrums.
But the efforts lost vigor as the Abe administration began to push for hawkish policies and churn out volatile remarks regarding wartime history.
Seoul has been recently seeking to mend the bilateral ties ahead of the 50th anniversary of their normalization next year, arranging a trilateral high-level dialogue with Beijing and sending Tokyo other reconciliatory signals.
By Shin Hyon-hee (
heeshin@heraldcorp.com)
