South Korea and Japan strengthen their military cooperation and reaffirm their support for denuclearization

South Korea and Japan on Sunday reaffirmed their commitment to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and decided to strengthen their defense cooperation, illustrating the gradual rapprochement between the two neighbors despite a troubled historical past.

Meeting in Seoul for the sixth round of bilateral consultations, South Korean Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back and his Japanese counterpart, Shinjiro Koizumi, agreed to relaunch joint search and rescue exercises and deepen their security cooperation.

The two officials also reaffirmed their willingness to work together, as well as with the United States, to preserve regional stability in the face of an increasingly worrying security environment.

In a statement, the South Korean Ministry of Defense stressed that the two countries shared the same analysis of the situation and intended to continue their cooperation to maintain peace and stability in the region.

The two governments also announced a strengthening of exchanges between the Black Eagles air demonstration teams of South Korea and Blue Impulse of Japan, a symbol of the warming of military relations between the two countries.

Since 2022, Seoul and Tokyo, with support from Washington, have been striving to turn the page on several decades of tensions related to the period of Japanese colonization of the Korean Peninsula between 1910 and 1945.

Bilateral relations had reached a particularly low point in 2019, when South Korea announced the end of the GSOMIA military intelligence-sharing agreement following trade restrictions imposed by Japan on exports of materials for the semiconductor industry.

Despite these historical differences, the governments of South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi are continuing the rapprochement begun in recent years, particularly in the face of security threats posed by North Korea and growing tensions in the Indo-Pacific region.

This new agreement confirms the willingness of the two US allies to consolidate their military cooperation while maintaining their common goal of a denuclearized Korean Peninsula.