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President Yoon Suk-yeol of South Korea toasts a glass of beer with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan at a dinner on March 16, 2023, following their summit in Tokyo. (Yonhap)

With Friday finalized as the date for a South Korea visit by Fumio Kishida as he prepares to step down as prime minister of Japan, analysts are focusing on President Yoon Suk-yeol’s intentions in agreeing to meet the Japanese leader.

The situation is viewed as unprecedented, with a foreign head of state planning a visit with less than a month left in his term. Even in light of Yoon’s emphasis on the importance of South Korea-Japan relations, few are welcoming a visit from the Japanese prime minister amid the fallout over the recent National Liberation Day celebrations.

The presidential office announced Tuesday that Kishida would be “visiting South Korea on Sept. 6 and 7,” adding that Yoon would be “having a summit with Prime Minister Kishida during this time.”

This is to be the 12th summit between Yoon and Kishida, coming around 50 days after they had their last summit on July 11 during a NATO summit in Washington, DC. The summit appears likely to take place on Friday.

The presidential office explained that Kishida’s visit came in response to the prime minister’s “active desire to visit South Korea before the end of his term in the interests of shuttle diplomacy between the South Korean and Japanese heads of state and in order to discuss directions for future advancement between the two sides while bringing the previous term to a successful conclusion.”

But observers in the diplomatic world said the visit would be highly irregular, given that Kishida effectively stepped down as prime minister when he declared that he would not be running for the Liberal Democratic Party leadership election on Sept. 27.

Kishida’s South Korea visit appears to have the aim of playing up what he views as the main achievements of his term, namely the improvement of relations with Seoul and the strengthening of trilateral military cooperation with South Korea and the US. Indeed, he is also coordinating a visit to the US during a UN General Assembly session toward the end of this month.

“The target audience for Kishida’s visit to Korea this time around is Japanese voters,” assessed an expert who formerly served as a high-ranking diplomat for Korea. “As a politician, he’s trying to showcase his legacy achievements of improving Korea-Japan relations and progressing trilateral cooperation with the US.”

But it remains to be seen what gains Yoon hopes to score from Kishida’s visit. Considering the rather sour domestic opinion about Korea’s relationship with Japan of late, it stands to reason that the timing of Kishida’s visit to Korea is far from optimal for the Yoon administration. Experts say that Yoon’s warm welcome for Kishida’s farewell tour stop in Korea goes to show just how little regard the president has for domestic public opinion. 

“Right now, the Yoon administration thinks that the Korea-US-Japan security cooperation they’re working on is all that matters, and that everything else, including contentious history, is trivial,” said Cho Sung-ryul, a professor of military studies at Kyungnam University who previously served as Korea’s consul general to Osaka. 

“They’re saying to hell with public opinion because they believe that they resolved all those ‘trivial issues’ that preceding administrations were preoccupied with but never could work out,” he said. 

By Park Min-hee, senior staff writer; Lee Seung-jun, staff reporter

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