Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will visit South Korea around October 15 in a bid to mend fences between the neighbours, a senior politician said Thursday.
Kang Hyun-Wook, a top policy maker of South Korea's ruling Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) told a party meeting that the MDP and the government this week decided to accept Koizumi's visit to Seoul.
South Korea has insisted that Japan must make efforts to heal the rift between the two nations before there can be a summit between their leaders.
"But the prime minister repeatedly expressed his sincere wish (to improve ties with Seoul) and the global economic slump has deepened following the terrorist attacks in the United States," Kang said.
"The two countries must also maintain close cooperations for a successful co-hosting of the 2002 football World Cup," he said.
Yonhap news agency said the government was expected to make a formal announcement on the visit on Thursday.
Koizumi has repeatedly said he wants talks with the leaders of China and South Korea, who have criticised him for visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on August 13.
The shrine is dedicated to some 2.5 million Japanese war dead including 14 convicted war criminals.
Before the visit, Japan's ties with China and South Korea were already strained by controversy over a Japanese government-approved school history textbook, which Beijing and Seoul allege whitewashes Japan's wartime atrocities.
South Korean President Kim Dae Jung made a landmark visit to Tokyo shortly after taking office in 1998.
Kim and then Japanese prime minister Keizo Obuchi made a declaration seeking to end bitterness left over from Japan's occupation of the Korean peninsula in the first half of the 20th century.
But disputes surrounding the textbooks, Koizumi's shrine visit and a wrangle over Korean fishing around the Kuril islands, occupied by Russia but claimed by Japan, have set relations back again.
(China Daily 10/04/2001)
