I have to agree that even though the Park-Abe summit did not lead to any breakthroughs, just the fact they met was significant considering all the bickering the past few years. Hopefully this will lead to better future cooperation as long as Prime Minister Abe can keep his political team in check in regards to making controversial comments that inflame tensions with Seoul:
South Korean President Park Geun-hye (R) and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shake hands prior to their summit talks at the presidential office Cheong Wa Dae in Seoul on Nov. 2, 2015. (Yonhap)
Experts on South Korea-Japan ties welcomed the results of Monday’s summit between President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, saying the meeting paved the way for better bilateral relations even without producing concrete outcomes.
Park and Abe held their first bilateral talks in Seoul on the sidelines of a trilateral summit with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. The format was intended to keep the first South Korea-Japan summit in three and a half years as low-key and practical as possible amid disputes over shared history.
A major stumbling block in the two countries’ relations has been the issue of Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery for Japanese troops during World War II. South Korea demands Japan offer a sincere apology and compensation to the victims before they all die, while Tokyo insists all issues related to its 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula were settled under the normalization treaty of 1965. [Yonhap]
