Seoul: North Korea has condemned a recent summit between South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Seoul, saying the move may cause a “military collusion” between the two countries, media reported on Wednesday, citing North Korean state-run news website Uriminzokkiri.
This past Sunday, Kishida started a two-day official visit to South Korea, the first such visit by a Japanese leader in 12 years, as a show of Japan’s desire to return to “shuttle diplomacy” of mutual visits, which was agreed upon during Yoon’s visit to Tokyo in mid-March.
“The military collusion between South Korea and Japan, much wanted by the United States, has entered the stage for it to be recklessly carried out,” the North Korean statement read, as quoted by South Korean news agency Yonhap.
Pyongyang also criticized Yoon’s remarks on Japan’s possible participation in the Washington Declaration, a Seoul-Washington agreement on the deployment of nuclear delivery systems to the Korean peninsula and contingency planning in case of the North Korean nuclear crisis, the report said.
The report added that Yoon’s “submissive” foreign policy helped Japan to conceal its “past atrocities” and obtain much confidence in Tokyo’s sovereignty claims over the islets of Dokdo, as well as possibly fulfill the plan of releasing contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
From 2019-2022, the bilateral relations between South Korea and Japan have been deteriorating until Yoon’s new administration decided to pursue the normalization of the ties.
South Korea removed Japan from its “white list” in 2019 following a similar move by Tokyo, which thus responded to a decision by the South Korean Supreme Court to oblige Japanese companies to compensate South Korean victims of forced labor during Japan’s colonial rule on the Korean Peninsula in 1910-1945.
