Off the wire
• Volkswagen hit with Australian class-action lawsuit over emissions scandal  • Mexican Romero, goalkeeper and model son  • Brazilian Lincoln learns lesson for FIFA U-17 World Cup  • Caixin China manufacturing PMI rebounds in October  • China's first home-made big passenger plane rolled off line  • Gerd Mueller, the only special one  • 6 confirmed killed in ferry capsizal in Myanmar  • China treasury bond futures open higher Monday  • Chinese shares open lower Monday  • China Hushen 300 index futures open lower Monday  
You are here: 　 Home

S.Korea, Japan start summit after over three years of hiatus

Xinhua, November 2, 2015 Adjust font size:

South Korean President Park Geun-hye and visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe started their first-ever summit meeting in Seoul on Monday after an extended diplomatic freeze.

Park's office Cheong Wa Dae said that the bilateral meeting started at about 10:05 a.m. local time (0105 GMT) in the presidential Blue House that is scheduled to run for about 90 minutes.

Park has encountered Abe in several multilateral summits, but she had refused to sit down one-on-one with the Japanese prime minister, since he took office in February 2013, due to his distorted perception of history.

The Seoul-Tokyo summit was last held in May 2012 between then South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and then Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda.

The bilateral summit was held on the sidelines of a trilateral leadership meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Seoul on Sunday, the first in three and a half years.

The South Korean president has maintained a hard-line stance on historical issues, especially on Korean "comfort women" forced to serve in the Japanese wartime military brothels during the militarist Japan's colonization of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945.

Abe has infuriated its neighboring countries, especially South Korea and China, since he returned to power in late 2012 as he paid respect to the disputed Yasukuni shrine, a symbol of the Imperial Japan's war of aggression and the colonization as it honors 14 convicted Class-A Japanese war criminals during World War II.

In the latest attempt by the Abe government to whitewash wartime history, three Japanese Cabinet ministers and scores of lawmakers paid homage to the war shrine on its annual fall festival, while Abe -- although he didn't visit -- made a ritual offering. Enditem