Update | South Korea, Japan, China hold first talks in three years to defuse tensions

The foreign ministers of China, South Korea, and Japan met for the first time in three years yesterday and agreed to work on resuming summit talks, which if achieved would be of huge significance in easing a series of historical and territorial tensions.

Anti-Japan sentiments in South Korea and China have grown sharply in recent years over what is seen as Tokyo's push to obscure Japan's brutal colonisation of the Korean peninsula and invasion of China in the first half of the 20th century.

Three-way talks among the countries' top diplomats had been subsequently suspended, and there has been no trilateral meeting of the countries' leaders since 2012, the year that Japan nationalised three of the Diaoyu Islands, which it calls the Senkaku Islands.

Yesterday, the ministers said after the meeting in Seoul that they would make efforts to resume trilateral summit talks "at the earliest convenient time for the three countries".

"The three foreign ministers, based on the spirit of looking squarely at history and moving forward to the future, have agreed to properly resolve related issues, improve bilateral ties and strengthen trilateral cooperation," South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se said at a joint news conference.

Despite the agreement between Yun, and his Chinese and Japanese counterparts Wang Yi and Fumio Kishida, it remains to be seen whether the summit talks can be realised any time soon.