INCHEON, SOUTH KOREA – The culture ministers of Japan, China and South Korea on Friday adopted a declaration calling for promoting cultural exchanges among them despite Tokyo-Seoul ties sinking over trade and wartime labor issues.
The Incheon Declaration, endorsed at a ministerial meeting in the Korean city, called for jointly holding cultural events during the 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Tokyo and the Winter Games in Beijing in 2022.
The declaration also stated the three Asian neighbors will make joint efforts to fight the pirating of animation and manga and use artificial intelligence and virtual reality in the culture industry.
“While Japan-South Korea relations are in a difficult situation, deepening grassroots-level exchanges through cooperation in the cultural fields will help improve ties,” Masahiko Shibayama, minister of education, culture, sports, science and technology, told reporters after the meeting.
The three-way meeting, which was attended by Chinese culture minister Luo Shugang and South Korea’s Park Yang Woo, has been held almost every year since 2007, based on a trilateral summit agreement. Friday’s meeting was the 11th in the series.
At their talks, the ministers also selected three host cities they called the Culture Cities of East Asia 2020 for a variety of cultural and artistic events to be held with the aim of furthering relations. The cities selected were Kitakyushu, Yangzhou in China and Suncheon in South Korea.
Tensions between Tokyo and Seoul have risen since Japan tightened controls on exports on critical chipmaking chemicals and other items, a move Seoul sees as retaliation for South Korean court rulings on forced wartime labor that ordered Japanese firms to compensate Korean victims.
Japan dislikes the rulings because wartime compensation issues were settled by a treaty both nations signed to normalize diplomatic relations in 1965.
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