The foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan will meet in Tokyo early next week for discussions on various issues including a scheduled summit of their top leaders, government officials said Sunday.
South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan's April 3-6 trip comes ahead of the planned summit between South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda in Tokyo on April 20.
Lee, a CEO-turned conservative leader who took office on Feb. 25, will stop over in Tokyo for the summit on his way from an official visit to the United States. Lee's meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush is scheduled for April 19-20.
The South Korean foreign minister returned home from Washington last week after fine-tuning the planned Lee-Bush summit. His meeting with his Japanese counterpart, Masahiko Komura, will cover the stalled nuclear disarmament talks with North Korea as well as the scheduled Lee-Fukuda summit, said South Korean Foreign Ministry officials.
South Korea and Japan are members of the six-party talks with North Korea which also include the United States, China and Russia. The forum has been stalled since late last year because of North Korea's failure to disclose all of its nuclear programs under an aid-for-denuclearization deal.
North Korea claims that it has fulfilled its end of the deal by giving a full accounting of its nuclear programs but the U.S. has rejected it as incomplete.
Seoul-Tokyo relations have always been testy because of their shared unhappy history. Japan ruled the Korean Peninsula as a colony from 1910-45.
The new South Korean president has emphasized several times that his country and Japan should "let bygones be bygones" and build a future-oriented relationship. However, history-related resentment runs deep in both sides.
Japan normalized relations with South Korea in 1965 but has no diplomatic ties with North Korea.
During his three-day visit to Japan, the South Korean foreign minister will also attend an informal ministerial meeting called to prepare for the Group of Eight (G-8) summit. This year's G-8 summit will be held in Japan's northern island of Hokkaido in July.
This year's G-8 summit will be joined by eight other countries including South Korea, China, India and Brazil.