Foreign ministers from South Korea, China and Japan will hold their first official trilateral meeting next month and plan to make the forum a regular event, officials said Wednesday. Song Min-Soon said he would meet China's Yang Jiechi and Japan's Taro Aso in South Korea's southern resort island of Jeju on June 3.
The agenda will include "ways of co-operating practically among the three nations, the political situation in Northeast Asia and other international issues," he told reporters. "We plan to build such a practice for South Korean, Chinese and Japanese foreign ministers to have substantive discussions, not on the sidelines of a multilateral forum but on a separate basis in the future," he said.
Song said it should develop into a "useful and effective framework for regional cooperation and dialogue." All three countries want to regularise the talks, he said. The foreign ministers have held trilateral meetings previously on the sidelines of multilateral meetings, but never as an official scheduled separate event. China and South Korea have prickly relations with Japan over what they see as its refusal to come to terms with its 20th century militaristic past, which included invasions of both nations. When Song met Aso in Jeju last month, he told him that "inaccurate" statements by Japanese leaders about the past were hindering ties.
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