Japan, South Korea foreign ministers meet to mend ties

By YURI KAGEYAMA and HYUNG-JIN KIM
Associated Press

TOKYO (AP) — Foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan have held talks in Tokyo in what both sides said was a renewed effort to improve bilateral relations. The countries’ ties have been strained mostly over historical issues, such as Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula and Tokyo’s mobilization of Korean laborers and sex slaves leading up to and during World War II. At the heart of the dispute are South Korean court rulings in 2018, which ordered two Japanese companies, Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, to compensate forced Korean laborers. The Japanese companies have refused to comply with the rulings, and the former laborers and their supporters responded by pushing for the forced sale of corporate assets of Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi.