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The leaders of South Korea and Japan agreed Sunday to keep up efforts to resolve their thorny historical disputes as they’re pushing to bolster security cooperation with the United States to better deal with North Korean nuclear threats.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida met twice on the sidelines of a regional gathering in Cambodia — with U.S. President Joe Biden and then bilaterally.
After the bilateral meeting, Kishida told reporters that he and Yoon reaffirmed their earlier agreement to work toward quickly resolving the issue of Japan’s wartime mobilization of Korean laborers during its 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.
Yoon’s office said in a statement the two leaders assessed that there have been active communications between their diplomats on “a current issue between the two countries, » in an apparent reference to the forced laborers. Both sides said they agreed to continue consultations to find an early resolution on the issue.
The two countries, both key U.S. allies, have been embroiled in a long-running spat over 2018 court rulings in Seoul that ordered two Japanese companies to compensate some of the Korean laborers or their families.
