N. Korea slams S. Korea-Japan summit as leading to ‘military collusion’

North Korea condemned this week’s summit between President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida through its propaganda outlet Wednesday, saying it has paved the way for a “military collusion” between the two countries.

Yoon and Kishida met in Seoul on Sunday in what marked a full resumption of “shuttle diplomacy,” or regular two-way visits between the neighbors’ leaders, after years of frayed relations over rows stemming from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule, including the issue of forced labor.

In the North’s first response to the summit, propaganda website Uriminzokkiri said “the military collusion between South Korea and Japan, much wanted by the United States, has entered the stage for it to be recklessly carried out.”

The website also apparently criticized Yoon’s remarks Sunday suggesting Japan could participate in the Washington Declaration, a Seoul-Washington agreement aimed at strengthening the U.S. extended deterrence commitment.

Uriminzokkiri claimed Yoon’s “submissive” foreign policy has facilitated Japan to cover up its past atrocities, and become much bolder in terms of its sovereignty claim over the South’s easternmost islets of Dokdo and Tokyo’s plan to release contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Later in the day, Pyongyang slammed the summit once again, saying it will only make the region unstable.

“If Japan persistently resorts to forming a U.S.-led tripartite military alliance, turning its face away from reality, it will plunge Northeast Asia into instability and finally turn it into a sea of flames, where it will perish,” the official Korean Central News Agency said via an article by Kim Sol-hwa, a researcher at the Institute for Japan Studies of the North’s foreign ministry.

The report said Japan’s potential participation in the Washington Declaration represents Washington’s “sinister intention to establish a U.S.-led nuclear military alliance in Northeast Asia.”

It added the declaration is “the most undisguised scenario for nuclear confrontation seriously threatening the peace and security not only of the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia but also in the rest of the world.”