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South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga

Amid reports that Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga committed the diplomatic discourtesy of backing out of a brief meeting that he’d arranged to have with his South Korean counterpart during the G7 summit in Cornwall, England, questions remain about his motivations. Since Suga’s approval rating has fallen to just above 30% because of his cabinet’s poor handling of COVID-19 and other issues, he appears to be more concerned with Japanese conservatives’ hostility to South Korea than with improving relations.

The South Korean government has repeatedly extended olive branches for improving bilateral relations since Suga became prime minister in September 2020.

In November 2020, Park Jie-won, director of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, met with Suga to communicate Seoul’s willingness to help Japan make the Tokyo Olympics a success.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in made another overture to Japan in a speech on the anniversary of the March 1 Independence Movement, in which he promised that “South Korea will work with Japan to ensure the success of the Tokyo Olympics” and called on the two sides to “sit down together while seeking to understand each other’s position.”

Moon reportedly wanted to use the brief meeting with Suga to communicate his willingness to attend the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics, which will be held in late July, in the hope of finding a way to improve bilateral relations.

By attending the opening ceremony, Moon would be reciprocating former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s attendance at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics opening ceremony in February 2018. Moon also hoped that his attendance might create an opening for resolving current issues affecting South Korea and Japan.

South Korea’s Supreme Court has ordered Japanese companies to pay damages to victims of forced labor during Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea.

But Suga responded coldly in a press conference with Japanese reporters following the G7 summit. “Once again, I ask South Korea to offer a solution to the issue of the former labor conscripts,” he said.

Since taking office, Suga hasn’t budged an inch from his stubborn insistence that South Korea must be the one to create an opportunity for restoring the health of Korea-Japan relations.

Japanese analysts say that, since Suga has demanded that Seoul make the first move as a prerequisite for a summit with Moon, Suga was unlikely to agree to a meeting unless South Korea offered a solution that would be acceptable to Japan. The Japanese media had printed numerous articles claiming that South Korea, Japan, and the US were trying to coordinate a trilateral summit, or a bilateral Korea-Japan summit, alongside the G7 summit.

The Japanese government fed the media information and then monitored the public response before making a major diplomatic decision.

Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi was noncommittal when asked in a press conference on Friday, just before the G7 summit began, whether Suga would meet the leaders of South Korea and the US.

“There’s limited downtime in our schedule, so we’ll have to look into which countries to hold bilateral meetings with. Nothing has been decided at the present moment,” Motegi said.

In the end, Japan decided not to hold a meeting.

Japan rejected the claim that it had backed out a meeting with Moon as being “contrary to the facts.”

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said during a regular press conference on Monday that Japan had “immediately protested to Korea” about its “regrettable unilateral release of information.”

“The meeting between the two leaders wasn’t held because of scheduling issues during the G7 summit,” Kato said, suggesting that the meeting was canceled not deliberately but because of a lack of time.

But given the rigorous adherence to protocol in summit diplomacy, it’s hard to imagine an agreed-upon meeting being canceled without the agreement of both sides.

Furthermore, Suga told Japanese reporters in a press conference on Sunday that Moon had approached him twice on the previous day.

A senior official in the South Korean government underlined that lower-level officials had arranged for a meeting to be held “as limited time permits, whether that’s 10 minutes or 30 minutes.”

That has led some to conclude that Suga didn’t want a face-to-face meeting with Moon at the G7 summit. Japan is the only G7 member from Asia.

Significantly, Japanese newspaper the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported Sunday that Japan is fine with South Korea and others being observer countries at the G7 summit but is opposed to expanding the G7 framework.

When former US President Donald Trump said that he wanted to expand the G7 to include South Korea and other countries in June 2020, Japan strongly opposed the plan on the grounds that South Korea has “a different view of China and North Korea” than the G7 members.

However, Suga’s diplomatic discourtesy is likely to come back to haunt him. He’s regarded as a foreign policy neophyte, in contrast with his predecessor Abe, who managed to strengthen Japan’s alliance with the US during his long premiership, which lasted for seven years and eight months.

In November 2019, relations between South Korea and Japan were heading for rupture over Japan’s removal of South Korea from its “white list” of trusted trading partners and South Korea’s decision to scrap its GSOMIA intelligence-sharing agreement with Japan. But in the ASEAN Plus Three summit held that month in Bangkok, Thailand, Abe responded to Moon’s greeting and followed him to a sofa for an 11-minute conversation.

That stands in sharp contrast to Suga, who gave the US and other G7 countries the impression that Japan is to blame for the continuing chill in South Korea-Japan relations in his first appearance at a major multilateral conference.

By Gil Yun-hyung, staff reporter

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