South Korean foreign minister to meet with Japanese PM
(AP)
Updated: 2005-10-28 09:55

South Korea's foreign minister was set Friday to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, a meeting that was expected to be overshadowed by the premier's visit to a controversial war shrine.

Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, who had said his own visit to Tokyo was "unavoidable', said Koizumi's recent visit to the Yasukuni shrine had likely scuttled a planned summit between the Japanese premier and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun.

"The South Korean people were disappointed by Koizumi's visit to Yasukuni," Ban told his counterpart Nobutaka Machimura after arriving in Tokyo Thursday.

Koizumi later said he wanted South Korea to understand why he visited the shrine, which includes the names of convicted World War II war criminals among the 2.5 million war dead.

South Korea and other Asian nations say Koizumi's visits to the shrine symbolize Japan's lack of atonement for its militaristic past.

Roh and Koizumi agreed last year to meet twice a year. They have since met three times, and it's soon Roh's turn to visit Japan. But since Koizumi's Yasukuni visit, Roh's office has said a summit before the end of this year would be difficult "unless there is a significant change in the situation."

In his meeting with Ban, Machimura called for the two leaders to meet on the sidelines of an Asian leaders' summit next month in South Korea. Ban only said he would relay Machimura's message to Roh.

But the two did agree that there was a need to cooperate in efforts to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Six-nation talks on North Korea's nuclear program are expected in early November in Beijing, also involving China, the United States and Russia.

On the Yasukuni issue, Ban proposed that Tokyo build an alternative, secular national memorial that also honors civilians and non-Japanese war dead. Roh made a similar proposal to Koizumi earlier this year, but Tokyo has so far failed to come up with any concrete plans.

The ministers also discussed setting up a joint scholastic committee to study historical issues between the two countries, as well as the return by Japan of the remains of Koreans brought to Japan as forced laborers before and during World War II. The two sides agreed to speed up both tasks, Machimura said.

Japan ruled the Korean peninsula from 1910-1945 and many South Koreans remain deeply resentful of their former occupier.

As well as Yasukuni, the two countries are in disagreement over Japan's renewed claims to a set of disputed islets, and its approval of school textbooks that other Asian countries say gloss over the country's colonial history.