South Korea’s Park Geun-hye to hold first one-on-one summit with Japanese PM Shinzo Abe
South Korea and Japan’s meeting will be on the trilateral summit with China
South Korean President Park Geun-hye would hold a long-awaited summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe next week, with the sensitive issue of Korean “comfort women” on the agenda, officials said on Wednesday.
It will be their first one-on-one meeting after an extended diplomatic freeze, during which Park turned down repeated requests to sit down with Abe.
A spokeswoman for the presidential Blue House said the summit would take place in Seoul on Monday, on the sidelines of a trilateral leadership gathering with Premier Li Keqiang.
Relations between the two neighbours have never been easy - clouded by sensitive historical disputes related to Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule over the Korean peninsula and, in particular, the issue of Korean women forcibly recruited to work in Japanese wartime military brothels.
Park’s previous refusals to meet Abe were predicated on her insistence that Tokyo had yet to properly atone for its past actions.
Park is facing a delicate balancing act between her country’s rapidly developing ties with Beijing and US pressure to mend ties with Tokyo as she hosts the first three-way summit in three years with China and Japan.
Sunday’s summit will be a major diplomatic breakthrough for Abe, who has courted Park amid a push by Washington for its two main Asia allies to move beyond their bitter wartime history in the face of a growingly assertive China.
“We have conducted an increasingly mature diplomacy both with the United States and with China over the years,” a South Korean official said. “In the case of Japan, things have been more difficult, but we recognise we need to move forward.”
Few expect an overflowing of goodwill, but for Park the occasion affords an opportunity to be seen addressing issues of regional interest, including promoting business ties and tackling North Korea’s arms programme.
“China is not ready, Korea is not ready, but the Americans want Japan and (South) Korea to get together,” said Kunihiko Miyake, a former Japanese diplomat now at the Canon Institute for Global Studies in Tokyo.
Agence France-Presse, Reuters
