The Tokyo summit that brought together South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on 23 March 2023 successfully cleared away much of the accumulated debris of the last five years of dysfunctionality.
The two-day official visit — the first by a South Korean president in a dozen years — checked off a substantial list of to-do items. It restored regular meetings between the leaders of the two countries and rolled back the tit-for-tat trade measures in place since 2019. The two leaders embraced a shared security agenda, topped by countering North Korea, and reaffirmed the operation of the General Security of Military Information Agreement intelligence-sharing pact.
The stage is now set for a return to normalcy, or at least functionality, in South Korea–Japan relations. Looming over both leaders was the United States, their mutual ally. Biden administration officials have been pounding away at the need for trilateral cooperation, particularly in the security arena. For Yoon, the Tokyo summit was a necessary precondition for a state visit to Washington next month.
But the visit also offered evidence that Seoul and Tokyo share a desire to push back against a drift towards Cold War style confrontation and full scale economic war, with the two leaders announcing the creation of a new dialogue on economic security and a desire to restore the trilateral summit dialogue with China.
All of this was made possible due to President Yoon’s politically risky decision to accept the failure in reaching a bilateral agreement with Japan on the thorny wartime issue of compensation for South Korean labourers forced to work in Japanese mines and factories without pay. The Supreme Court of Korea’s decision in 2018 to order two Japanese firms — Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries — to pay a handful of surviving labourers was the primary driver of the recent downturn in South Korea–Japan relations.
Months of negotiations at the ministerial level failed to bridge the gap on this issue. South Korea yielded to Japan’s insistence that it was legally not obliged to pay the forced labourers, as this issue had been settled by the Claims Agreement reached at the time of normalisation of the two countries’ diplomatic relations in 1965. Seoul offered instead to use an existing fund for compensation, fed by contributions from POSCO and other South Korean firms.
Source : East Asia Forum
