SEOUL, Vice defense ministers of South Korea and Japan held talks Wednesday to discuss bolstering security cooperation, Seoul's defense ministry said, amid efforts to step up coordination with the United States against North Korean threats.
Vice Defense Minister Shin Beom-chul sat down with his Japanese counterpart, Kiyoshi Serizawa, on the margins of the Seoul Defense Dialogue, an annual international security forum, marking the first meeting of its kind since September last year.
The two sides agreed to maintain "close" communications to enhance security cooperation, citing the agreement between President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to develop bilateral ties to a higher level during their summit in Seoul in May.
They also agreed to continue consultations to advance bilateral security cooperation in a future-oriented way, while agreeing on the importance of building trust and pushing for various avenues of cooperation, it said.
"This vice ministerial meeting was arranged based on the two sides' shared view on the importance of South Korea-Japan and South Korea-U.S.-Japan security cooperation to deter North Korea's nuclear and missile threats and to enhance regional peace and stability," the ministry said in a release.
Relations between Seoul and Tokyo thawed following the Yoon Suk Yeol administration's decision in March to address the issue of compensating Korean victims of Japan's wartime forced labor -- long a thorn in bilateral ties.
South Korean Vice Defense Minister Shin Beom-chul (L) shakes hands with his Japanese counterpart, Kiyoshi Serizawa, on the margins of the Seoul Defense Dialogue at a hotel in southern Seoul on Oct. 18, 2023, in this photo provided by Shin's office.
Later in the day, Shin held back-to-back talks with his Philippine counterpart, Irineo Cruz Espino, and Singapore's Senior Minister of State for Defense Heng Chee How, according to the ministry.
In the meeting with Espino, the two sides noted the development of bilateral military cooperation through various joint exercises and agreed on the need to further expand mutual participation in combined drills.
During the talks with Heng, Shin shared the view on the importance of bilateral cooperation against non-traditional security threats and agreed to seek ways for cooperation in such areas as maritime security and the cyber domain.
Meanwhile, Defense Minister Shin Won-sik met with his Malaysian counterpart, Mohamad bin Hasan, on the sidelines of the forum for talks on arms industry and defense cooperation, his office said.
Minister Shin hailed Malaysia's decision to sign a deal in May to purchase South Korea's FA-50 light attack aircraft and requested pushing for substantive cooperation by establishing a regular dialogue platform between their ministries.
In turn, the Malaysian minister proposed cooperation in various areas, such as personnel exchange and technology cooperation, based on the bilateral memorandum of understanding on defense signed last year, according to Shin's office.
Shin also emphasized the need for cooperation between regional countries to deter attempts to "change the status quo by force," which undermine regional peace and prosperity, while his Malaysian counterpart noted the role of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to respond to an unstable global security environment, it said.
Defense Minister Shin Won-sik (L) shakes hands with his Malaysian counterpart, Mohamad bin Hasan, during their meeting on the margins of the Seoul Defense Dialogue at a hotel in southern Seoul on Oct. 18, 2023, in this photo provided by the Defense Daily.
Source: Yonhap News Agency