SEOUL: Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida arrived in South Korea on Sunday as Seoul and Tokyo seek to restart their “shuttle diplomacy” and mend ties in the face of growing nuclear threats from Pyongyang.
Kishida is making the first official bilateral visit by a Japanese leader to South Korea in over a decade. He first headed to Seoul’s National Cemetery — where war veterans, including from the fight against Japanese colonial rule, are buried — to lay flowers and pay his respects.
Kishida will hold a key summit later in the day with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who has made resetting ties with Japan a top priority for his administration. Yoon was in Tokyo in March for a fence-mending visit.
The East Asian neighbors, both crucial security allies of the United States, have long been at odds over historic issues linked to Japan’s brutal 1910 to 1945 colonial occupation of the Korean peninsula, including sexual slavery and forced labor.
Kishida said Sunday ahead of his departure that the two leaders were working to resume so-called “shuttle diplomacy” — paused for years during a bitter trade spat linked to the forced labor issue.
During their March summit, Kishida and Yoon agreed to end tit-for-tat trade curbs, with Kishida inviting the South Korean leader to a G7 meeting in Hiroshima this month.
Kishida said he was looking forward to “an honest exchange of views” with Yoon, “based on a relationship of trust.”
Yoon is expected to host a dinner party at the presidential residence — likely serving Korean barbeque — and he may even cook for Kishida, according to local reports.
The fact that Kishida headed straight for Seoul’s National Cemetery to pay his respects is noteworthy, Lim Eun-jung, an associate professor at Kongju National University, told YTN news.
“It is a rare scene for a sitting Japanese prime minister to visit, so it makes me watch very closely.”
Yoon and Kishida are set to hold what Tokyo’s leader said would be “candid discussions” about the tricky topic of forced labor, which torpedoed ties in 2018.
That year, South Korea’s Supreme Court ordered Japanese firms to compensate the wartime victims of forced labor, enraging Tokyo and triggering an escalating series of economic measures.
But Yoon, who took office last year, has sought to bury the historical hatchet, earlier announcing a plan to compensate victims without direct involvement from Tokyo — a move that was unpopular domestically.
Dozens of South Koreans gathered Saturday to protest Kishida’s trip, saying that Japan’s wartime animosities must top the agenda at Sunday’s summit.
Kishida “must sincerely apologize for Japan’s crimes against humanity and fulfil its responsibilities,” said demonstrator Kim Jae-won.
The best possible outcome for Koreans would be for “Kishida to apologize in his own words,” Benjamin A. Engel, research professor at the Institute of International Affairs at Seoul National University, told AFP.
Efforts to mend ties come as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who last year declared his country an “irreversible” nuclear power, doubles down on weapons development and testing.
Pyongyang has conducted a record-breaking string of launches in 2023, including test-firing the country’s first solid-fuel ballistic missile — a technical breakthrough.
The United States and South Korea have in turn been ramping up their defense cooperation, staging a series of major military exercises including two trilateral drills involving Japan this year.
“By reinstating ‘shuttle diplomacy,’ President Yoon will achieve a significant diplomatic victory before his first year in office concludes,” Tongfi Kim of the Brussels School of Governance wrote.
“Barring diplomatic ‘accidents’ due to careless mistakes, Kishida’s visit to South Korea will have a positive impact on the bilateral relationship and pave the way for deepening US-Japan-South Korea trilateral cooperation in the coming months.”
Japanese PM arrives in South Korea for landmark summit
https://arab.news/nqq8v
Japanese PM arrives in South Korea for landmark summit
- Kishida is making the first official bilateral visit by a Japanese leader to South Korea in over a decade
- Kishida to hold a key summit later in the day with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
