国际英语资讯:Japan, S. Korea rift continues as little headway made in prime ministers talks

TOKYO, Oct. 24 -- Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held talks with South Korean Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon in Tokyo on Thursday amid strained ties between the two countries over wartime issues that have spilled over into a tit-for-tat trade row.

The Japanese prime minister has been meeting with foreign dignitaries, including Lee, who attended Emperor Naruhito's enthronement proclamation ceremony on Tuesday.

The talks held at Abe's office lasted about 20-minutes and began with a cordial handshake between the pair in front of the press.

After the meeting, Lee told reporters that he had handed his Japanese counterpart a letter from South Korean President Moon Jae-in, although officials from both sides alluded to a lack of tangible progress being made during the meeting in bringing the bitter two-way spat to an end.

Japan and South Korea have seen bilateral ties sink to their lowest level in recent years following South Korea's top court last year ordering Japanese firms to pay compensation to forced laborers during Japan's 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.

Japan, for its part, has claimed the rulings are not in line with international law and run contrary to the foundation of friendly and cooperative relations between the two neighbors since the 1965 normalization of diplomatic ties.

Japan maintains the matter of compensation for wartime labor was "finally and completely" resolved under the pact.

As tensions escalated between both sides, Japan hit back with tighter export controls on some materials used in high-tech products by South Korean firms, including some essential for use in smartphone displays and chips, mainstays of South Korea's tech-forward economy and integral to some key supply chains that flow from Japan and through South Korea onward.

With the diplomatic rift widening between the two neighbors, Japan went on to remove South Korea from its "whitelist" of nations entitled to simplified export control procedures.

Seoul had been on the "whitelist" since 2004 and had been guaranteed preferential treatment in terms of importing certain products from Japan.

South Korea retaliated by taking Japan off its own "whitelist" of trusted trade partners and announced tighter restrictions on certain imports from Japan, including coal ash and some waste recycling materials.

South Korea followed up by announcing its decision to scrap the General Security of Military Information Agreement, or GSOMIA, with Japan, on exchanging classified military information, as the tit-for-tat dispute escalated.

The GSOMIA pact between both sides, signed in 2016, had enabled the two neighbors to share military information and has helped both sides to counter potential regional threats.

The talks held between the two counterparts Thursday, however, had initially raised the prospect of the bitter dispute potentially showing embryonic signs of easing, sources close to the matter had said.

They were referring to remarks made by Lee to Natsuo Yamaguchi, leader of Komeito, Abe's ruling Liberal Democratic Party's coalition ally on Wednesday.

Lee reportedly told Yamaguchi that he had hoped the talks with Abe would help create an environment in which the two sides could begin to work towards establishing "future-oriented" ties.

But, nevertheless, despite the highest-level talks being held between both countries in more than a year, Japanese officials intimated after the talks that little progress had been made, and that Japan's expectations remained for South Korea to "change its stance."

Despite the lack of tangible progress made between both sides, with a potential meeting between Abe and Moon on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York still up in the air, with Japan asserting its reluctance and stating that the meeting would be conditional, Abe and Lee both agreed in principle that the protracted dispute should not be left unchecked as the two counties are important neighbors.

"At present, bilateral ties are in an extremely severe state, but I believe we should not leave them as they are," the Japanese Foreign Ministry quoted Abe as telling his South Korean counterpart.

Lee, for his part, was quoted by the ministry as saying that he shares an understanding of the importance of dialogue between the two nations.

The pair also agreed that despite the ongoing feud, importance should continue to be placed on people-to-people exchanges between both countries.