SEOUL: South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi were set to hold their fourth meeting in about six months on Tuesday, underscoring their push to deepen ties between the historical Asian rivals in the face of geopolitical challenges.<\/p>\n
Lee will host Takaichi in his hometown of Andong, a southeastern South Korean city famous for a centuries-old traditional folk village that is a UNESCO World Heritage site. In January, the two met in Takaichi\u2019s hometown of Nara, an ancient Japanese capital.<\/p>\n
The meetings mark the first time sitting leaders of the two countries have visited each other\u2019s hometowns.<\/p>\n
South Korea\u2019s presidential office expressed hope that Tuesday\u2019s summit would strengthen mutual trust between Lee and Takaichi. Takaichi told reporters Tuesday morning she hopes the talks will deepen cooperation \u201cunder the severe geopolitical conditions such as situations in the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific.\u201d<\/p>\n
The summit\u2019s official agenda includes economic and energy cooperation, the Iran war and development of their bilateral ties, which have no current sticking points. Experts say the meeting likely will proceed smoothly and the relationship will remain on a positive trajectory for now.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe two countries put more emphasis on agenda for cooperation than contentious issues,\u201d said Choi Eunmi, a Japan expert at the Seoul-based Asan Institute for Policy Studies. \u201cThey would now think scenes of constantly fluctuating relationship or eventually negative bilateral ties won\u2019t be helpful to anyone now.\u201d<\/p>\n
South Korea and Japan are both key US allies with vibrant democracies. But their relationship has long experienced severe ups and downs over grievances stemming from Japan\u2019s 35-year colonization of the Korean Peninsula before the end of World War II.<\/p>\n
Relations began improving in 2023 when Lee and Takaichi\u2019s predecessors took steps to move beyond history disputes and strengthen cooperation, saying they faced common challenges like the US-China strategic competition, supply chain vulnerabilities and North Korea\u2019s advancing nuclear arsenal.<\/p>\n
When Lee and Takaichi each took office as new leaders last year, observers worried about Takaichi\u2019s reputation as a right-wing security hawk and anticipation that Lee, a political liberal, would tilt toward North Korea and China and away from the US and Japan. But they have maintained cooperation, even in some unprecedented ways.<\/p>\n
In August, two months before Takaichi\u2019s inauguration, Lee became the first South Korean leader to choose Japan as his first destination for a bilateral summit. At the end of their meeting in January, Lee and Takaichi drummed to K-pop hits such as BTS\u2019 \u201cDynamite\u201d in a jam session arranged by the Japanese leader, a heavy metal fan who was a drummer in her college days.<\/p>\n
Lee has said he and Takaichi share a view that national leaders must act differently than ordinary politicians. But many observers say the two leaders also likely feel the need to tighten cooperation because they have more grave geopolitical difficulties than their predecessors such as US President Donald Trump\u2019s America-first policy and global economic damage caused by the Iran war.<\/p>\n
South Korea and Japan both have pledged hundreds of billions of dollars in US business investments. Trump\u2019s tariff war and his transactional approach to security threaten the trust in the US held by many South Korean and Japanese.<\/p>\n
Ties between Seoul and Tokyo are so delicate they could suffer unexpected setbacks if they fail to formulate coping measures for explosive issues such as Japan\u2019s colonial-era mobilization of Koreans as forced laborers and sex slaves, according to experts, who say wrangling over those issues has eased as the two governments try to avoid public discussions.<\/p>\n
\u201cBoth countries aren\u2019t talking about how to resolve and prevent recurrences of conflicts over those issues and we don\u2019t know when they could occur again,\u201d Choi said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SEOUL: South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi were set to hold their fourth meeting in about six months on Tuesday, underscoring their push to deepen ties between the historical Asian rivals in the face of geopolitical challenges. Lee will host Takaichi in his hometown of Andong, a southeastern South …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":97969,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97958"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97971,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97958\/revisions\/97971"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}