Trilateral Summit

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President Moon Jae-in will go to Tokyo next week for a trilateral summit with the leaders of China and Japan. Moon will become the first South Korean president to have visited Japan in six and a half years. In Tokyo he will brief Japanese and Chinese officials on the results of the latest inter-Korean summit and discuss cooperation among the three countries to establish peace on the Korean Peninsula.

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He’ll sit down with his Japanese counterpart, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, as well as Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at the trilateral summit scheduled for May ninth. The summit will focus on boosting cooperation among the three countries to implement the inter-Korean summit declaration announced at the truce village of Panmunjeom last week. On April 29th, Moon told the Japanese prime minister in a phone call that he would gladly serve as a bridge between North Korea and Japan. On the same day, he sent National Intelligence Service Director Seo Hoon to brief Tokyo on the results of the inter-Korean summit at the request of the Japanese prime minister. There’s speculation that Moon will deliver a message to Abe from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's on the normalization of ties between Pyongyang and Tokyo and the issue of Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea.