TOKYO, Nov 30 (NNN-NHK) – Japanese Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, Hiroshi Kajiyama, said, senior trade officials from Tokyo and Seoul will meet to discuss Japan’s tightened export controls, with the meeting slated to take place next month.
The proposed meeting, set to be held during the third week of Dec, in Tokyo, will mark the first such director general-level meeting between both sides, in more than three years and the first since Japan slapped tighter controls on tech-related exports to South Korea in July.
Kajiyama said, preparations for the talks will be held the following week in Vienna, Austria, with working-level officials having held dialogue on the matter.
The plans for talks between senior trade officials from both sides comes, as Tokyo and Seoul have been at odds since Oct last year, when South Korea’s top court ordered a Japanese firm to pay compensation for the forced labour of South Koreans during Japan’s 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.
Japan maintains the matter was settled by a 1965 pact, which saw Tokyo pay Seoul some 500 million U.S. dollars, under the banner of “economic cooperation.”
The dispute, however, continued and spread to trade and security issues, with both sides tightening export restrictions and removing each other from their preferential lists of trade partners.
The spat also spilled over into security areas, with Seoul cancelling the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), before deciding to extend the pact with Japan, just hours before the deal was due to expire at midnight, Friday.
GSOMIA is a bilateral military intelligence-sharing accord signed between both countries in Nov, 2016.
The pact enabled the two neighbours to share military information and has helped both sides to counter potential regional threats.– NNN-NHK