SOUTH Korea, Japan and China’s top diplomats today reaffirmed the need to hold a trilateral summit at the “earliest” possible time, Seoul’s Foreign Minister Park Jin said following their first three-way meeting in more than four years.

The foreign ministers’ meeting in the southern port city of Busan between Park, Yoko Kamikawa and Wang Yi came as Beijing has been showing growing concern over Tokyo and Seoul’s deepening security ties with Washington.

It also came days after North Korea successfully placed its first military spy satellite into orbit, prompting the suspension of a five-year-old military accord between the two Koreas intended to de-escalate tensions on the peninsula.

The summit between the leaders of South Korea, Japan and China topped the foreign ministers’ meeting agenda.

“The three ministers reaffirmed ... to hold the summit, the pinnacle of the trilateral cooperation system, at the earliest, mutually convenient time,” Park told reporters.

“We agreed to expedite the necessary preparations,” he said without giving a specific time frame for the summit.

No leaders’ summit has been held since 2019, in part due to diplomatic and historical disputes between South Korea and its former colonial ruler Japan.

Legal disputes over Japan’s 1910-1945 rule over the peninsula persist between the two countries.

On Thursday, a South Korean court ordered Japan to compensate 16 women for forced sexual slavery during World War II, overturning a lower-court ruling that had dismissed the case.

At a bilateral meeting with her South Korean counterpart ahead of the three-way talks, Japanese Foreign Minister Kamikawa called the ruling “extremely regrettable” and requested Seoul to take measures to correct the “violation of international law”. – AFP, November 26, 2023.