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TOKYO, May 16 (AP) – Amid a high-level effort to deal with a raft of global emergencies, this weekend’s Group of Seven summit will also see an unusual diplomatic rapprochement, as the leaders of Japan and South Korea look to continue tinkering with years of turmoil. A relationship that has always been hostile and quarrelsome.
At first glance, the two neighbors seem like natural partners. They are strong, advanced democracies and staunch allies of the United States in a region plagued by the threat of authoritarianism.
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Yet the ongoing fallout from centuries of complex, bitter history, culminating in Japan’s brutal colonial rule of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945, led to more caution than friendship.
Much of the recent sudden shift in tone is due to a shared focus on China’s growing aggressiveness, the threat of North Korea’s rapidly growing nuclear missile arsenal — and deep concerns about how Russia’s war in Ukraine is affecting both issues. Some diplomatic push from Washington to provide military protection to its allies and want them to counter China’s rising global influence more forcefully has also helped.
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Daniel Snyder, a lecturer in East Asia at Stanford University, said Tokyo and Seoul “understand that their national and political survival depends on submitting to the global and regional priorities of the administration of US President Joe Biden”.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s invitation to South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol to the G-7 talks in Hiroshima is just the latest sign of these renewed ties.
It follows back-to-back summits of leaders, which has not happened in years. Japan also agreed to South Korea’s request to send a team of experts to visit the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant later this month to see preparations for the planned discharge of treated but still slightly radioactive wastewater into the ocean.
The Friday-Sunday G7 summit will allow leaders to deepen their burgeoning relationship — Kishida, Yoon and Biden plan to meet on the sidelines — while also trying to persuade the world’s most powerful leader to step up Defense cooperation with China and North Korea expanding its military posture in the region.
Questions of history have long plagued Seoul and Tokyo. Relations between the two countries, for example, soured after a South Korean court in 2018 ordered two Japanese companies to compensate a group of South Korean plaintiffs who were used as wartime slave labor by the companies.
Disagreement over the ruling later spilled over over trade and military cooperation. Japan insists that all compensation issues have been resolved through a 1965 treaty to normalize relations.
Yoon’s summit with Kishida came after his government announced in March a domestically unpopular plan to use funds from South Korean companies to compensate forced laborers.
The move is aimed at preventing the court from liquidating Japanese companies’ local assets, which would lead to a further diplomatic breakdown.
In talks with Yoon, Kishida agreed to resume defense, trade and other talks, and Japan recently announced it was negotiating an agreement with Washington and Seoul to share real-time data on North Korean missile launches.
Both Seoul and Tokyo are concerned about geopolitical uncertainty caused by Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, which has raised concerns about similar Chinese aggression in the South and East China Seas, as well as Taiwan, a self-governing democratic island claimed by Beijing. North Korea has also used the global focus on the invasion to step up its nuclear missile tests.
Japan is one of many Asian countries with territorial disputes with China, which is largely reflected in Kishida’s push to move Japan away from its post-World War II doctrine of self-defense alone. Last year, Tokyo adopted a new national security strategy that includes acquiring a pre-emptive strike capability and targeting cruise missiles to counter threats from North Korea, China and Russia.
Alarmed by the growing threat from North Korea — Pyongyang has tested about 100 missiles since early 2022 — Yoon may be using improved relations with Japan as a way to forge a stronger alliance with the United States.
The Yoon administration has expanded joint military exercises with the United States, which also include three-way exercises with Japan, while seeking greater assurances from Washington that it would quickly and decisively use nuclear weapons to protect its allies in the event of a conflict with North Korea. nuclear attack.
“(Tokyo and Seoul) are increasingly recognizing that various security issues in the region are becoming increasingly interconnected,” prompting the countries to reassess each other’s importance, said Jin Chang Soo, an analyst at South Korea’s Sejong Institute.
At a recent meeting in Washington, Yoon and Biden agreed to a statement that included more nuclear information sharing and regular visits by U.S. nuclear-powered submarines to South Korea.
The Biden administration may now be pushing for an expanded deterrence dialogue between Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo “that would provide a strong response to North Korea and China, and even to a potential Sino-Russian military axis,” Snyder wrote recently.
Hiroshima, the first nuclear weapons target in history, could provide Kishida and Yoon with a symbolic backdrop to raise awareness of the North Korean threat while emphasizing the goal of nuclear nonproliferation.
In another confidence-building gesture, Kishida and Yoon plan to pay their respects at the Korea Atomic Bomb Victims Memorial in Hiroshima.
However, despite the improved relationship, it is uncertain how long the settlement will last.
After decades of poverty and dictatorship following the 1950-53 Korean War, South Korea has emerged as a developed economic and military power. But there is a huge policy swing between a conservative government (like the current one in power) and a liberal government that is more cautious about strengthening ties with Japan and the United States.
Then there are the historical issues, including the ongoing court hearings on forced labor, which are still “buried like landmines not far from the surface, ready to be detonated,” Snyder said. (Associated Press)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the body of content may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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