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Foreign Minister Park Jin of South Korea bumps elbows with Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi of Japan ahead of their talks at a hotel in downtown New York on Sept. 19. (Yonhap)

South Korean and Japanese diplomatic officials appear to be locked in a battle of wills ahead of a possible summit that they are working to organize during a session of the UN General Assembly in New York.

While the two sides’ foreign ministers met there to discuss the key issue between them — namely the compensation of victims of forced labor mobilization during Japan’s occupation of Korea — Tokyo has shown no real sign of a change in its stance.

On Monday afternoon, South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs Park Jin met in New York with his Japanese counterpart, Yoshimasa Hayashi, for the fourth bilateral talks since the Yoon Suk-yeol administration took office.

In a regular briefing in Seoul on Tuesday, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) spokesperson Lim Soo-suk explained that Park had “communicated to Japan in detail the positions that he had heard while meeting personally with the forced mobilization victims and the opinions from various walks of life in South Korea that he encountered during the last four rounds of private-government council meetings.” He also said Park had “called for a “good-faith response.”

“The Japanese side also showed a sincere stance, and opinions were exchanged in depth,” Lim added.

According to various MOFA officials, Park was fairly specific in sharing the demands of the victims and the various solutions proposed during the joint council meetings.

In particular, he appears to have explained to Japan about the conclusion of the council — which finished up its activities on Sept. 5 — that it would not be advisable for the South Korean government to spend its budget to provide compensation, and that the effort to raise the funds should be directed by the private sector, including South Korean and Japanese businesses.

The survivors have expressed that they regard it as a “bare minimum condition” for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and other Japanese companies implicated in war crimes to apologize and take part in compensation.

But the Japanese government does not appear to have stated any specific stance on the matters of an apology and compensation. Instead, it reportedly reiterated its position that while it agrees on the need to resolve the compensation issue in order to improve bilateral relations, South Korea needs to take the first step in devising an appropriate solution.

The Asahi Shimbun and other news outlets quoted Hayashi as saying that Tokyo “welcomes” Seoul communicating its desire to improve bilateral relations at Yoon’s 100th-day press conference and elsewhere — but emphasizing Japan’s “consistent position” that because the issue of compensating victims of forced labor mobilization was previously resolved with the two sides’ Claims Settlement Agreement in 1965, the South Korean side is responsible for coming up with a solution.

With the two sides at odds in the talks between their top diplomats, it remains uncertain whether the bilateral summit will actually come to pass. A MOFA official avoided giving an answer when asked whether the summit was discussed during the ministers’ meeting.

“I don’t have anything else to say about the specifics concerning the summit,” the official said.

In a New York Times interview published on Sunday, just before he departed on a series of overseas visits, President Yoon Suk-yeol shared his hopes for a “grand bargain” with Tokyo that would put a wide range of issues on the table, including the forced labor mobilization matter, bilateral security cooperation, and economic and trade-related issues. His message was that improvements in South Korea-Japan relations were urgently needed to bolster trilateral security cooperation with the US in response to the North Korean nuclear issue.

The MOFA’s explanation of the outcome of the foreign minister talks can be interpreted along the same lines. There, the ministry said the two ministers had “agreed on the position that we should continue bolstering South Korea-Japan and South Korea-US-Japan cooperation in consideration of the fast-changing recent international political situation and the serious circumstances confronting the Korean Peninsula.”

The problem is that the issue is fraught with domestic political difficulties due to the low approval ratings of both Yoon and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Historical issues are a hot potato for the two sides, each of which wants to avoid giving the appearance of “conceding” to the other.

For this reason, observers in the foreign affairs community are predicting that even if the South Korea-Japan summit does come to pass, it is very likely to be a pro forma affair involving little more than an exchange of greetings.

By Jung In-hwan, staff reporter; Kim So-youn, Tokyo correspondent

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