S. Korea, Japan to hold foreign ministerial talks on Afghanistan

By Lee Chi-dong
SEOUL, Feb. 10 (Yonhap) -- South Korea and Japan were to hold a meeting of their
foreign ministers in Seoul on Tuesday for talks on bolstering Seoul-Tokyo ties,
countering North Korean nuclear threats and jointly supporting the reconstruction
of Afghanistan, government officials said.
The talks between South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan and his Japanese
counterpart, Hirofumi Nakasone, are largely to follow up on last month's summit
between the leaders of the neighboring nations.
Nakasone is scheduled to arrive in Seoul later in the day in his first trip to
South Korea since he assumed his post last September.
"In the foreign ministerial talks on Wednesday, the ministers also plan to
discuss how to strengthen trilateral cooperation with the United States in the
administration of President Barack Obama," a South Korean foreign ministry
official said on the customary condition of anonymity.
The two will finalize a plan for joint official development assistance projects
for Afghanistan, which is struggling to rehabilitate itself, he added.
Seoul and Tokyo reached a tentative deal in director-level discussions late last
month to push for joint aid for vocational training and bean cultivation in the
war-ravaged nation, according to the official.
The ministers will hold a joint press conference to brief reporters on the
results of their meeting instead of issuing a joint statement, he said.
The two sides, if they reaffirmed such cooperation on bilateral and global
issues, would put aside their long-running historical and territorial disputes,
part of the legacy from Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.
Japan's repeated attempts to whitewash its wartime atrocities and claim Dokdo, a
set of South Korean-controlled rocky islets in the East Sea, have been a source
of frequent diplomatic wrangling.
A ministry source later said that Yu and Nakasone may touch on the sensitive
subject of Tokyo's pursuit of a meeting between a former North Korean agent and
the family of a Japanese woman abducted by North Korea decades ago.
Japan wants the South Korean government to help the family members of Yaeko
Taguchi, who was abducted by North Korean agents at the age of 22, interview Kim
Hyeon-hee, a former death-row inmate involved in the bombing of a Korean Air
passenger plane while in flight in 1987.
Taguchi is known to have taught Kim the Japanese language. Kim claimed earlier
that Taguchi was alive at least until 1987.
Japan said it has confirmed the abductions of 17 Japanese citizens by Pyongyang in
the 1970s and 1980s. The North admitted to only 13 and allowed five of them to
return to Japan in 2002, claiming the others had died.
The Japanese minister is scheduled to return to Japan on Wednesday after paying a
courtesy call on President Lee Myung-bak.
lcd@yna.co.kr
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