South Korea proposes Japan summit to improve ties
South Korea says it has offered Japan a long-awaited leadership summit seen as a major conciliatory step toward improving relations after an extended period of diplomatic mistrust between the two Asian countries.
A spokeswoman for South Korea’s president said Monday that Seoul had proposed a summit between Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and President Park Geun-Hye on the sidelines of a trilateral leadership meeting being held with China in Seoul next week.
“We have made a proposal to hold the summit on November 2, but have not heard from Japan yet,” she said.
However, there was no official confirmation of the proposal by Tokyo.
Ties tied to the past (and present)
Since taking office in February 2013, Park has repeatedly refused to hold a bilateral meeting with Abe, saying that Tokyo has yet to properly atone for its past actions.
Initiated in 2008, the annual Korea-China-Japan trilateral summit meeting was suspended in 2012 after Seoul-Tokyo relations went into one of their regular tailspins. The last summit between the then-South Korean and Japanese leaders Lee Myung-Bak and Yoshihiko Noda was held in December 2011.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang will represent Beijing at the gathering in Seoul and will hold a separate one-on-one meeting with Park.
The development comes amid simmering territorial rows among the three neighbors, including a dispute between Seoul and Tokyo over a tiny set of South Korean-controlled islets, as well as highly-emotive disputes related to Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule over the Korean Peninsula.
Tokyo is also at odds with Beijing over the sovereignty of a separate chain of islands in the East China Sea, known as Senkaku islands in Japan and as Diaoyus in China, which Tokyo nationalized in 2012.
The islands have been under Japanese administrative control since 1972.
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