Yoon sends delegation to Tokyo to improve ties

Diplomacy

Published: 24 Apr. 2022, 17:27 Updated: 24 Apr. 2022, 18:55

Yoon sends delegation to Tokyo to improve ties

President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol's special delegation to Japan, led by Rep. Chung Jin-suk of the People Power Party, is seen ahead of their departure to Tokyo at Incheon International Airport on Sunday. [YONHAP]

President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol invited Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to his May 10 inauguration to try to repair the deeply frayed ties between the two neighbors.

On the campaign trail, Yoon said Korea-Japan relations “cannot be left as they are,” and advocated summits between leaders and other high-level meetings.

An invitation to the inauguration was included in a letter from Yoon to Kishida that a special delegation team will deliver this week. The delegation to Japan left from Incheon International Airport around noon on Sunday. Led by Rep. Chung Jin-suk of the People Power Party (PPP), it will stay in Japan five days.

“The invitation to the inauguration ceremony is a show of will to recover trust through communication between the leaders," an official on Yoon’s transition team said Sunday, "and a proposal to re-open Korea-Japan summits.”

It has been over two years since the leaders of Korea and Japan met face-to-face. Their last summit was a meeting between Moon Jae-in and prime minister Shinzo Abe in December 2019. There were no meetings at all with the prime minister Yoshihide Suga, who was in power from September 2020 to October 2021. A summit was scheduled for last June but Tokyo canceled it because of Korean military training around Dokdo, islets claimed by Japan.

Kishida, who became prime minister last October, has not met face-to-face with Moon either. Even in the phone calls he made to foreign leaders following his inauguration, he postponed his call to Moon relegated it to a “second-tier” group, highlighting the deterioration of Korea-Japan relations.

In Japan, president-elect Yoon’s more positive approach has been welcomed in principle, but not led to any changes in how Japan deals with issues regarding Korea.

Last Thursday, Kishida paid a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, which always causes controversy. The shrine honors 1,068 war criminals, 14 of whom were A-Class.

In a Diplomatic Bluebook released by Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs last Wednesday, an annual report on Japan’s foreign policy and activities, Japan continued to insist that Dokdo is “Japanese territory.”

But many say there's no other direction for relations to go but up. The first stop for the Korean delegation that left on Sunday will be to a monument in Tokyo honoring Lee Soo-hyun, a Korean student who died trying to rescue a Japanese man who fell onto subway tracks in 2001. The monument is a symbol of friendship between Korea and Japan.

A member of the delegation said at a press briefing at Incheon International Airport, “Remembering Lee, who wanted friendship between the two countries, we will do our best to make the first steps to thaw the frozen relations between Korea and Japan.”

BY JUNG JIN-WOO, LEE YOUNG-HEE [kjdnational@joongang.co.kr]