By Jung Sung-ki
South Korea and Japan have begun working-level discussions on signing a bilateral agreement to share sensitive military information, including that on North Korea’s missile and nuclear threats, an official at the Ministry of National Defense said Tuesday.
Seoul proposed the plan in a regular working-level defense meeting with Tokyo in July to help facilitate the sharing of key military information on Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs, the official said.
“We felt a need to share defense information with Japan in a more effective way,” the official told reporters. “The two countries have actually shared defense information but haven’t had a related agreement.”
The South Korean government has a total of 21 agreements of this kind with the United States, Russia and others, he said.
Japan has agreements with the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
A final decision has yet to be made on whether or not the two nations will push forward signing a formal agreement on sensitive information transfers, he added.
“Both sides are studying the issue of signing an agreement in terms of procedures and legal aspects among others,” the official noted.
In an interview with Yonhap News Agency, Sunday, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said that Tokyo and Seoul need to seek full-fledged cooperation on security affairs in tandem with ever-growing economic and cultural exchanges between the neighboring nations.
In his first interview with Korean media since taking office in June, Kan said, “I think Japan and South Korea have reached a stage to think about cooperation in the security sector as well as politics, economy and culture fields.”
His comments were the first touching on security cooperation between the two neighboring countries with an acrimonious past. Japan colonized South Korea from 1910-1945.
But the unpredictability factor regarding North Korea may well prompt some real cooperation.
North Korea conducted two nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009, defying calls by the international community to give up its nuclear ambitions.
The communist state has also test-fired short- and long-range missiles that can hit Japan and reach part of the U.S. continent.
The six-party talks on the North’s nuclear capability have been in limbo for more than a year after the Stalinist regime boycotted the multilateral framework to protests international sanctions imposed following its nuclear test in April last year.
![[INTERVIEW] German professor hopes to boost appreciation for Korean traditional music](https://img.koreatimes.co.kr/upload/thumbnailV2/bfd15b77cdda4f549455b97d6ce4863c.jpg/dims/resize/178/optimize)
