South Korea and Japan will hold working-level talks this month on sharing military information on North Korea, the Defense Ministry said Tuesday.
Tadashi Miyagawa, chief of the intelligence bureau at Japan’s Defense Ministry will visit Seoul on June 15 for three days to attend the regular bilateral conference, ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said at a regular briefing.
“The two sides will discuss the situation of Northeast Asia and ways to exchange relevant military information,” Kim said.
Such meetings took place regularly from 1971 until last year, when there was a break due to worsened bilateral ties.
Kim, however, denied the meeting being relevant to a possible signing of a bilateral intelligence-sharing agreement.
Japan has been calling on South Korea to discuss the bilateral information-sharing deal along with the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement. Seoul has been rejecting the request as relations continued to sour over the Japanese government’s reinforced attempt to whitewash its past atrocities in recent years.
In 2012, the two countries discussed the possibility of the intelligence-sharing military agreement only to shelve it at the last minute following vehement public opposition from South Korea.
Last year, Seoul, Tokyo and Washington signed a trilateral information-sharing agreement against the threats of North Korea.
