South Korean president urges expanded know-how cooperation with Japan

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol met with Japanese enterprise leaders on Monday and known as for expanded know-how cooperation between the nations, which he described as a key ingredient in broader efforts to enhance relations.

Yoon has met twice with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in current weeks, demonstrating their intent to beat historic grievances which have strained ties for years and to strengthen cooperation in response to shared challenges, together with a nuclear-armed North Korea and rising Chinese assertiveness within the area.

They will meet once more this weekend at a summit of the Group of Seven main industrialized nations in Hiroshima, the place they may also maintain talks along with U.S. President Biden, who has been looking for to strengthen alliances with Japan and South Korea to counter North Korea and China.

Meeting with a delegation led by Mikio Sasaki, the previous chairman of the board of Japan’s Mitsubishi Corp. who heads the Japan-Korea Economic Association, Yoon spoke glowingly in regards to the potential for enterprise cooperation in semiconductors, batteries and electrical automobiles, and in constructing extra resilient provide chains amid geopolitical uncertainties.

“Mutually complementary cooperation is possible between South Korean companies, which possess excellent manufacturing technologies, and Japanese companies, which are highly competitive in materials, components and equipment,” Yoon’s workplace quoted him as saying.

Sasaki instructed Yoon that exchanges between the nations are rising as their relations start to thaw and that his group will encourage Japanese corporations to make use of extra South Korean college students and younger adults, in accordance with Yoon’s workplace.

Ties between Japan and South Korea have lengthy been difficult by disputes stemming from Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945.

Yoon’s conferences with Kishida got here after his authorities introduced in March a domestically contentious plan to make use of native funds to compensate a gaggle of Korean plaintiffs who had been enslaved by Japanese corporations through the colonial interval. The transfer was aimed toward resolving a dispute over South Korean court docket rulings in 2018 that ordered Japanese firms to pay reparations, which drew an indignant response from Tokyo, which insists that each one compensation issues had been settled by a 1965 treaty that normalized relations between the nations.

The dispute spilled over into commerce in 2019, when Japan tightened its export controls on key chemical compounds wanted by South Korean corporations to provide semiconductors and shows, prompting South Korea to file a grievance with the World Trade Organization. The nations additionally downgraded one another’s commerce standing and South Korea threatened to scrap a bilateral navy intelligence sharing settlement that symbolized their three-way safety cooperation with Washington.