South Korea has canceled its planned coast guard drills with Japan aimed at preventing maritime accidents, Japanese media reported on Friday, citing a regional coast guard base amid a spiraling political and trade row between Seoul and Tokyo
TOKYO (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 22nd November, 2019) South Korea has canceled its planned coast guard drills with Japan aimed at preventing maritime accidents, Japanese media reported on Friday, citing a regional coast guard base amid a spiraling political and trade row between Seoul and Tokyo.
According to the NHK broadcaster, the eighth Regional Coast Guard Headquarters in the Southern Japanese city of Maizuru, which is located in the Kyoto prefecture, said that the joint exercise that was scheduled for November 27 will not take place.
The regional headquarters, however, refused to comment to the broadcaster on whether the cancellation of the drills is linked to the current crisis in bilateral relations.
The trade and political row between Tokyo and Seoul was triggered in July shortly after a South Korean court ruled that Japanese companies must pay reparations to former Korean workers who were forced into labor during World War II by the Japanese Empire. The relations worsened further after Japan introduced limitations on the exports of certain raw materials for the South Korean electronics industry.
The following month, Tokyo removed Seoul from its list of trading partners with preferential rights. Also in August, the South Korean government announced the termination of a bilateral pact on sharing intelligence information.
Tokyo's official position regarding the reparations is that the bilateral 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations had fully resolved the matter.
