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| Image: Flickr User - Republic of Korea |
By Shannon Tiezzi
Yun Byung-se will visit Japan to commemorate the 50th anniversary of ROK-Japan diplomatic ties.
For the first time since President Park Geun-hye took office in February 2013, South Korea’s foreign minister will visit Japan. The South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) announced on Wednesday that “Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se will visit Japan on June 21-22 to attend a reception marking the 50th anniversary of the normalization of the ROK-Japan relations… and meet with his Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida.”
Japan-South Korea ties have been frosty for the past two years, with historical divisions and a territorial dispute driving a wedge between the two Northeast Asian neighbors. The relationship has been inching forward in past months, both on the bilateral level and trilaterally with China. Japan and South Korea restarted the “two-plus-two” dialogue between their foreign and defense ministers in April, after a five-year hiatus. China, Japan, and South Korea restarted their trilateral foreign ministers’ meeting in late March, raising hopes for a possible summit among the three countries’ leaders.
This year is a particularly interesting time for Japan-South Korea relations – it marks not only the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II (and Japanese colonial rule of Korea) but the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between Japan and South Korea, which were formalized on June 22, 1965. That the former anniversary has received far more attention than the latter speaks volumes about the current state of the relationship. There were concerns in the United States, which counts Japan and South Korea as its most important Asian allies, that the June 22 anniversary would go mostly unmarked.
Read the full story at The Diplomat