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| When South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, touched down in Japan on Thursday, it was the first time in a dozen years that a leader from Seoul had made the short flight for a one-on-one visit with the Japanese prime minister. |
| It was a sign that the long-fraught relationship between the two Asian neighbors is thawing, a quick follow-up to last week’s ice-breaking announcement that South Korea would drop its demand that Japanese companies compensate Korean victims of forced labor during World War II. |
| On Thursday afternoon, Japan gave a further indication that it was reciprocating South Korea’s move when the trade ministry in Tokyo announced that it was moving to drop restrictions on technology exports to South Korea that had been imposed since 2019. |
| Although the ministry gave no specific date for dropping those restrictions, it was yet another signal that the two countries, which have been at odds over history and territory for years, are now willing to cooperate to face rising threats from North Korea’s advancing nuclear program and China’s growing military ambitions in the region. |
| Thursday morning brought another reminder of the threat from North Korea, as the country launched an intercontinental ballistic missile for the second time in a month, hours before Mr. Yoon and Mr. Kishida met. South Korean officials said the missile was fired at a steep angle and fell into waters west of Japan. |
| In a joint news conference after the two leaders met on Thursday, Mr. Kishida said he wanted to open a “new chapter” in relations between the two countries. He said there was an “urgent need to strengthen Japan-Korea relations in this strategic environment.” |
| The Japanese prime minister said he hoped to visit South Korea and resume “shuttle diplomacy,” with high-level leaders visiting each other’s countries regularly. As for further measures to improve relations, Mr. Kishida was not specific, but he said that as the countries drew closer, new steps would be announced “one by one.” |
| Mr. Yoon said that with Japan moving to lift the export restrictions on important technology, and with Japanese and Korean tourists visiting each other’s countries, “mutual benefit will be significant, and that is national interest to me.” |
| The steps toward conciliation by the two leaders are significant not only to Japan and South Korea, but also to their alliance with the United States. The Americans need their two strongest allies in the region to get along so they can focus on creating a bulwark against China, which is upending geopolitical calculations not only in Asia but across the globe. |
| Mr. Yoon’s visit, which was expected to include a dinner on Thursday at the prime minister’s residence and meetings between business leaders on Friday, was also a test of how well the two leaders could assuage domestic public opinion about issues that have long aroused heated passions in both countries. |
| “Ninety percent of Japan-South Korea relations are domestic politics,” said Kunihiko Miyake, a former Japanese diplomat who is now a visiting professor at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. “Therefore, nobody knows what’s going to happen.” Mr. Miyake said that he was “still cautiously optimistic, but more optimistic than cautious.” |
| For the moment, the political risk is higher for Mr. Yoon. When he announced last week that South Korea would create a government-run fund to pay wartime forced laborers as a workaround for a Korean court order requiring compensation from Japanese companies, victims and activists denounced the agreement. |
| Opposition lawmakers described it as “one of the worst diplomatic disasters in the history of South Korea-Japan relations.” Public opinion polls released in Seoul this week showed that close to 56 percent of the public regarded Mr. Yoon’s solution to the forced labor dispute as “humiliating diplomacy.” |
| In Japan, which appeared to give little last week, the response was more favorable — a Kyodo News poll on Monday showed more than 57 percent of the public supporting the South Korean solution. |
| There is still risk for Mr. Kishida from the right flank of his Liberal Democratic Party and other conservative critics. An editorial in the Sankei Shimbun, a right-leaning newspaper in Tokyo, castigated Japan’s welcoming response to Mr. Yoon’s plan last week as “extremely regrettable” and “pandering” to South Korea for “distorting and denouncing historical facts.” |
| The newspaper said that by not openly objecting to the agreement, Mr. Kishida had tacitly accepted the South Korean court’s argument: that Japanese companies owed the Korean laborers reparations despite a 1965 agreement through which Japan had already made payments. |
| Despite such criticism, analysts expect that Japan will eventually offer even more in return. Keidanren, Japan’s largest business federation, announced on Thursday that it would work with its counterpart from South Korea to set up a scholarship fund for student exchanges between the two countries. |
| South Korea has also suggested that it would like Japanese companies to make voluntary contributions to the forced-labor fund. So far, the Japanese business community has not said much, but analysts said it was probably mulling some kind of conciliatory gesture. Mr. Yoon said that South Korea would not demand that Japanese companies pay into the fund. |
| “If the South Korean side goes first and doesn’t ask too much of the Japan side, then the Japanese side will try to make an advance,” said Tsuneo Watanabe, senior research fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Tokyo. |
| The last time a South Korean president came to Japan for an official bilateral visit, in 2011, Lee Myung-bak pressed his hosts to compensate Korean women who were forced to work as sex slaves by the Japanese military during World War II. |
| When Japan did not reciprocate, the South Korean public turned against Mr. Lee, who went on to antagonize Tokyo by visiting a disputed set of islets in the sea between South Korea and Japan in 2012. Relations between the two countries deteriorated from there. |
| This time around, both sides may have strong reasons to keep the reconciliation on track, as Russia’s war in Ukraine causes energy shortages and supply chain problems, and China’s rising ambitions threaten to alter the balance of power in Asia. |
| “There are extraneous events that force collaboration and cooperation,” said Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan. Even as relations between Japan and South Korea remained frosty in recent years, trilateral meetings between the Americans, the South Koreans and the Japanese continued. |
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