Photo/Illutration Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, center, meets with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol in Phnom Penh in November 2022. (Provided by Cabinet Public Affairs Office)

To further improve bilateral relations between Tokyo and Seoul, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is considering visiting South Korea this summer, according to government sources.

The visit would reciprocate South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s arrival in Tokyo on March 16.

The last time a South Korean president visited Japan was in June 2019 when Moon Jae-in arrived in Osaka to attend the Group of 20 summit.

Kim Sung-han, Yoon’s national security adviser, said the visit would clearly show that bilateral relations had entered a new stage of improved normalized ties.

“This will be an important opportunity to end the negative spiral and to establish once again a situation that will allow for genuine exchanges between the two nations," Kim said at a March 14 news conference. 

A government source said that Kishida and Yoon plan to hold a joint news conference and are expected to take questions from reporters after they meet on March 16. 

According to the South Korean presidential office, a dinner reception for Yoon will also be held that same evening to deepen the personal relationship between the two leaders.

The next day, Yoon is scheduled to meet with various lawmakers, including former Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, who is scheduled to take over the top post of a group of Diet members working to improve ties with Seoul.

Yoon will also participate in a business roundtable as well as address students from the two nations at Keio University.

The announcement on March 6 by South Korea of the government plan to shoulder compensation for wartime Korean laborers who had sued Japanese companies set the stage for the moves to improve bilateral ties.

During the March 16 meeting between Kishida and Yoon, an important topic will be restoring military intelligence sharing under the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA).

Such sharing of military intelligence has never been more important with North Korea launching ballistic missiles at a faster pace.

Seoul nearly scrapped the GSOMIA in 2019 with Japan when bilateral relations plummeted to its worst level in the postwar era.

Also of concern to South Korean officials will be the stricter export controls implemented by Tokyo on Seoul. The measure was in retaliation for the South Korean Supreme Court rulings ordering Japanese companies to compensate wartime laborers.

The two sides have already agreed to begin working-level talks and Japan might return export controls to what were in place in 2019 if South Korea retracts a complaint it had submitted with the World Trade Organization over the Japanese measures.

According to a government source, Japan will also seek to improve economic ties from a security standpoint, especially regarding the supply of semiconductors by South Korea.

Japan has already strengthened ties with the United States and Taiwan regarding semiconductors and including South Korea in the picture would be another way to counter efforts by China in that sector.

A delegation of South Korean businessmen will also visit Japan at the same time and plans to hold talks with their Japanese counterparts over a wide range of topics, including energy security, global warming and dealing with a falling birthrate and graying population.

(This article was written by Taro Kotegawa, Shiki Iwasawa and Hideki Aota in Tokyo and Kiyohide Inada in Seoul.)

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