South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin will meet Japan Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on July 18

South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin will meet Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida during a visit to Japan on July 18 for talks, public broadcaster NHK said on Thursday.

South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin will make a three-day visit to Japan from Monday and hold conversations with his Japanese counterpart Yoshimasa Hayashi, the government said Friday, as their countries look to further develop ties frayed by history-related disputes.

Ties have been fraught for a really long time due to the bitter legacy of Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Late disagreements have gone from wartime forced work to export controls, yet the leaders of the two nations have communicated interest in further developing relations.

Park would visit Japan interestingly since he took up his post in May under the new administration of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol. During his trip, he intends to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, as indicated by sources familiar with the countries’ bilateral relations.

Park and Hayashi are scheduled to hold talks in Tokyo on Monday evening, with Japan’s Foreign Ministry saying it trusts the South Korean foreign minister’s visit would assist with restoring the countries’ relations to a “healthy” state.

Their meeting would be the two nations’ first foreign ministerial discussions in Japan since November 2019.

Bilateral ties sunk to their most reduced level in a long time under previous South Korean President Moon Jae In because of issues connected to Japan’s 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, including Koreans forced to fill in as “comfort women” in Japan’s military brothels.

Japan keeps up with the issues raised by South Korea, for example, compensation demands from South Koreans over wartime work, have proactively been settled, asking the adjoining country to submit to their past agreements.

Japan and South Korea are working toward a thaw in bilateral relations under Yoon, who has vowed to take a “future-oriented” way to deal with the bilateral relationship.

The sources have said Park is likewise expected to straightforwardly convey his condolences to Kishida and Hayashi over the death of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, fatally shot during an election stump discourse last Friday in western Japan.

During his visit to Seoul to go to Yoon’s inauguration ceremony toward the beginning of May, Hayashi met Park, who was then a candidate for South Korean foreign minister, and requested he visit Japan at an early date.

Park is likewise expected to make sense of the advancement in the envisaged public-private body for officials and specialists to talk about ways of tending to the wartime work issue, following South Korean Supreme Court rulings in 2018, as per the sources.

The rulings requested Japanese organizations to pay harm to Korean plaintiffs for their forced labor, however, the organizations have not complied with that.

The two neighbors kept on being at odds over Seoul-controlled, Tokyo-claimed islets in the Sea of Japan, called Takeshima in Japan and Dokdo in South Korea.

The most effective method to tackle North Korea’s missile and nuclear threats is additionally anticipated on the agenda, as Pyongyang has over and again test-fired ballistic missiles since the beginning of the year, and concerns are developing that the North might do what might be its most memorable nuclear test beginning around 2017.