Japan and China agreed Sunday to resume reciprocal visits by their leaders, underscoring that Asia’s two biggest economies are eager to mend ties in the ye<\/b>
\nBEIJING \u2013 Japan and China agreed Sunday to resume reciprocal visits by their leaders, underscoring that Asia\u2019s two biggest economies are eager to mend ties in the year marking the 40th anniversary of the signing of a bilateral friendship treaty.
During 2\u00bd hours of talks between Foreign Minister Kono Taro and his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, in Beijing, the two confirmed the importance of mutual visits by their leaders as part of a full-fledged push to improve Sino-Japanese relations, a Japanese government official said.
Kono and Wang also agreed to hold as soon as possible a trilateral summit that also includes South Korea, which Tokyo had wanted to host last year, the Japanese official said. The summit would bring Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to Japan for the first time since he took office in 2013.
\u201cWe want to improve overall (bilateral) ties this year,\u201d Kono, the first Japanese foreign minister to visit China in about two years, said at the outset of the meeting open to the media.
Kono, who arrived on Saturday, noted the importance of this year as Tokyo and Beijing mark the 40th anniversary of the peace and friendship treaty.
Wang responded by noting that China welcomes Japan\u2019s \u201cstrong determination\u201d to improve relations.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese President Xi Jinping have yet to make official visits to their respective countries. This has been due, in part, to the dispute over the Senkaku Islands, a group of uninhabited islets in the East China Sea known in China as the Diaoyu Islands. The tiny islets are administered by Tokyo, but also claimed by Beijing and Taipei, which calls them Tiaoyutai.
In addition, North Korea\u2019s ballistic missile and nuclear ambitions were on the agenda at the meeting, with Tokyo and Beijing agreeing to continue working together toward denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, the Japanese official said.
Tokyo has urged Beijing to exercise its substantial leverage over Pyongyang and play a key role in forcing the country to change its policy.
Meanwhile, Kono lodged a protest over the entry of a Chinese submarine into the contiguous zone around Japanese territorial waters near the Senkakus earlier this month, urging Beijing to take steps to prevent this from happening again.
Kono and Wang agreed to make efforts for the early implementation of a Maritime and Aerial Communication Mechanism in the East China Sea.
Tokyo and Beijing have been mired in a territorial row over the Senkakus for years. The dispute hit a fever pitch after the government led by then-Prime Minister Yoshiko Noda, Abe\u2019s predecessor, decided to effectively put them under state control in September 2012.
J. Berkshire Miller, a senior visiting fellow with the Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo, said that although Beijing and Tokyo pledged to implement crisis management mechanisms in the East China Sea, \u201cneither side has agreed to even the most baseline conflict-avoidance mechanisms.\u201d
Chinese vessels and aircraft, Miller said, were likely to continue to enter the waters and skies surrounding the Senkakus as Beijing continues to diversify its blend of ships, aircraft and tactics in the East China Sea \ufeff\ufeff \u201cthrough the employment of \u2018gray zone\u2019 tactics that look to gradually push boundaries without crossing red lines to provoke a united response from Japan and the U. S.\u201d
These tensions, though, appear to have become a \u201cnormalized\u201d part of the Sino-Japanese relationship, and bilateral ties look to be improving after both Abe and Xi bolstered their domestic power bases late last year.
In a sign of this improvement, the two nations reached an effective accord on a bilateral social security agreement that would eliminate dual pension payments by Japanese expats in China and vice versa.
Ahead of any Xi-Abe meeting could come a trilateral summit that also involves South Korea. Seoul hosted the previous trilateral meeting in 2015 and Tokyo has been due to host the next one, though a plan to hold it in 2016 was dropped amid political turmoil in South Korea that saw the country\u2019s president at the time, Park Geun-hye, ousted.
The three countries have been rotating summit-hosting duties since 2008, although the gatherings were not held in 2013 and 2014 after a chill in Japan-China relations over the Senkaku dispute.
\u201cWhile the trilateral summit would be positive, it really needs to be complemented with bilateral visits \u2014 ideally both in China and Japan,\u201d said Miller.
Miller said that while a bilateral summit in China might occur before the year\u2019s end, \u201cthe realization of a Xi Jinping visit to Tokyo remains a bit more aspirational.\u201d
\u201cBeijing is still holding out likely for some concession or summit achievement, such as progress toward Japan potentially joining the AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank) or more concrete cooperation on the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative),\u201d he said.
Kono\u2019s trip to China was the first by a Japanese foreign minister since his predecessor, Fumio Kishida, visited in April 2016.<\/p>\n