Yoon asks Kishida to revitalize corporate exchanges between two nations

President Yoon Suk-yeol has told Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida that they need to make efforts to revitalize corporate exchanges between the two nations during their first summit in New York and recent phone talks, according to the presidential office Sunday.

Yoon and Kishida held phone talks last week in the wake of a flurry of North Korea’s ballistic missile launches, including one that flew over Japan.

The call came weeks after the two held their first summit on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, which raised hopes of improving bilateral relations badly frayed over wartime forced labor and other issues related to Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.

During the summit in New York, Yoon told Kishida that exchanges of businesspeople between the two nations will become more active if bilateral relations are normalized, according to the presidential office.

Yoon made similar remarks during the telephone talks with Kishida last week.

A senior presidential official told Yonhap News Agency that Yoon is seeking to address economic issues between the two nations.

“In the Korea-Japan relationship, there has been a tendency to mention a lot of past history, security and political issues, and omit economic issues, but this time, it is different,” the official said.

In 2018, South Korea’s top court ruled that Japanese firms should pay compensation to forced South Korean labor victims, and Japan imposed export curbs against South Korea in an apparent retaliation.

Japan has claimed that all reparation issues related to the 1910-45 colonial rule were settled under a 1965 treaty that the two countries signed to normalize relations.