Foreign minister to make rare trip to Japan

The Republic of Korea's foreign minister, Yun Byung-se, will visit Tokyo on Sunday, the first such trip in four years, as the US allies prepare to mark the 50th anniversary of the normalization of ties amid a chill because of feuds over the wartime past.

Yun will meet Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida on Sunday and attend a ceremony at the ROK embassy the next day, the anniversary of a 1965 treaty normalizing diplomatic ties, the ROK Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday. The visit was simultaneously announced in Tokyo.

Relations between Japan and the ROK have been cool mainly because of disputes over the legacy of World War II and Japan's 1910-45 annexation of the Korean Peninsula.