Japan PM, South Korea president-elect agree to improve ties

Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korea’s president-elect Yoon Suk Yeol talked on the phone Friday, agreeing to cooperate toward improving their countries’ ties, while signaling a thaw in icy relations strained by wartime history disputes

TOKYO -- Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korea's president-elect Yoon Suk Yeol talked on the phone Friday, agreeing to cooperate toward improving their countries' ties, while signaling a thaw in icy relations strained by wartime history disputes.

Kishida told reporters after the 15-minute talk that “sound relations” between Japan and South Korea are “indispensable in achieving the rules-based international order and ensuring peace, stability and prosperity in the region and the world."

Yoon, a conservative former top prosecutor and foreign policy neophyte, was elected South Korean president this week and will replace outgoing Moon Jae-in, under whose leadership bilateral relations have sunk to their lowest level in years over Japan's atrocities committed during its 1910-1945 colonization of the Korean Peninsula.

Japanese officials, including lawmakers in Kishida's conservative governing party, have welcomed the victory of Yoon, who is expected to seek a stronger alliance with the United States, improved ties with Japan and a tougher stance toward North Korea. Yoon is to take office in May and serve a single five-year term.