The foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan yesterday reaffirmed the importance of bilateral ties and the three-way relationship with the US as they renewed efforts to mend relations amid the war in Ukraine and other global tensions.

South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs Park Jin and his Japanese counterpart Yoshimasa Hayashi agreed to work together on the nuclear threat from North Korea and on the need to resolve a dispute over Japan’s colonial-era forced mobilization of Korean laborers, two foreign ministries said.

The nations’ ties have been strained mostly over historical issues, including forced labor leading up to and during World War II.

At the heart of the dispute are South Korean court rulings in 2018, which ordered two Japanese companies, Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, to compensate forced Korean laborers.

The Japanese companies have refused to comply with the rulings, and the former laborers and their supporters have responded by pushing for the forced sale of corporate assets of Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi.

The ministers shared a view that the disputes over the forced laborers must be resolved at an early date, a South Korean foreign ministry statement said.

A Japanese statement said that Hayashi told Park that both sides need to build a constructive relationship based on the normalization of relations in 1965. Tokyo has long maintained that all compensation issues had been settled by then.

Since taking office in March, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol has been pushing to improve ties with Japan, and bolster trilateral security cooperation with Washington and Tokyo to better deal with North Korean nuclear threats.

At the start of the talks in Tokyo, Park and Hayashi bumped elbows and posed for cameras at the official guest house as they conversed softly in English. Both have attended schools in the US, while Park also studied in Japan.

The visit, the first by a South Korean foreign minister since November 2019, comes after the assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, considered an influential figure in shaping Japan’s foreign policy.

Park expressed his condolences on Abe’s death.

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