President Park Geun-hye shakes hands with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as US President Barack Obama looks on, at the Hague, the Netherlands, March 25, 2014.
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The meetings could be significant even if the three leaders only manage to build confidence and agree to more summits, said Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University in Japan.
Newspapers in Japan reported that the spat centered on Tokyo balking at Seoul’s pressure for Japan to make a few sort of concession on the issue of Korean women forced into sex slavery by Japan’s military leading up to and during World War II.
The suspension of the leadership meeting came mainly from frosty relations between South Korea and Japan over sensitive historical disputes.
It has been more than three years since the last summit between the two countries’ leaders – relations were hit when former Korean President Lee Myung-bak defiantly ended his administration with a visit to the islands of Dokdo, which both countries claim to be their territory.
Rather than Xi, however, China will be represented in Seoul by the less influential Premier Li Keqiang. Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga kept matters at a strictly abstract level while addressing the issue of an apology during a regular briefing on October 26. The summit between the three Asian nations was initiated in 2008 and had been annually held until 2012.
Park’s previous refusals to meet Abe were predicated on her insistence that Tokyo had yet to properly atone for its past actions.
A 23-year-old Somali woman who was allegedly raped 15 weeks ago on Nauru is being transferred to Australia for the second time to discuss her abortion and mental health, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said Wednesday.
Korean government sources said the United States played a crucial role in promoting the Korea-Japan summit. Park replied that she believed the meeting could take place on the sidelines of the trilateral summit and that she expected progress on the comfort women issue.
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The issue of comfort women has always been one of the key sticking points in bilateral relations. Washington repeatedly pressed Tokyo to do something about the comfort women issue ahead of the summit, diplomatic sources said.
