South Korean President Park Geun-hye will meet with the foreign ministers of China and Japan this weekend, Park's office said Friday.
  

Park's office did not elaborate on the meeting that will also include South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se.
  

The courtesy call on Saturday by Wang Yi from China and Fumio Kishida from Japan comes amid simmering tensions in the region over an advanced U.S. missile-defense system that Washington hopes to deploy to South Korea, as well as history and territorial rows.
  

It will be the first time for Park to meet with the top diplomats of China and Japan at the same time since she took office in 2013.
  

The three top diplomats will later meet at a Seoul hotel, the first meeting of its kind since late 2012. History and territorial rows have prevented them from getting together.
  

Last year, South Korea said a trilateral summit with China and Japan might be held if the countries successfully conclude their foreign ministers' meeting and conditions mature.
  

In November, Park floated the idea of resuming a regular trilateral summit, which has been put on hold since May 2012 due to tensions between South Korea and Japan and between China and Japan over territorial and other history-related issues.
  

Japan controlled much of China in the early part of the 20th century.
  

South Korea and Japan have failed to make substantial progress in addressing the issue of Korean women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japan's World War II soldiers.
  

Korean sex slaves, commonly called "comfort women," have been one of the knottiest issues stemming from Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.
  

The meeting comes as South Korea is struggling to walk a diplomatic tight rope between the U.S., Seoul's key ally, and China, Seoul's largest trading partner, over a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery.
  

THAAD is designed to shoot down ballistic missiles in their terminal stage using a hit-to-kill program.
  

Washington says the THAAD battery is a purely defensive system designed only to counter ballistic missile threats from North Korea.
  

Still, China has repeatedly expressed its opposition to the possible deployment of a THAAD battery in South Korea as the radar system can monitor military facilities in China. (Yonhap)