Will Meeting Been Japanese, Korean, & Chinese Foreign Minister Lead to Any Breakthroughs?

I guess just the fact that all three foreign ministers are meeting is progress, but I don’t expect anything to become of it:

For the first time in nearly three years, the foreign ministers of China, South Korea and Japan will meet Saturday for trilateral talks that could pave the way for a new era of cooperation – or prolong festering animosities rooted in the World War II era.

South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se will host his Chinese and Japanese counterparts, Wang Yi and Fumio Kishida, in Seoul for the discussions, which were last held in 2012.

The meeting is seen as a possible prelude to a three-way summit between leaders of the countries later this year. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met briefly on the sidelines of the APEC world leaders’ gathering in Beijing in November, but have never had a bilateral summit since they both came to power in 2012. Nor has Abe had a summit with South Korean President Park Geun-hye. Park and Xi, however, have met repeatedly, and warmly.

The 70th anniversary of the war’s end will be marked this summer in Asia with a variety of high-profile events, including a military parade in Beijing. Seven decades since Tokyo’s surrender, Japan, South Korea and China have strong economic ties, but deep strains remain, inhibiting collaboration on a range of matters including maritime issues and North Korea.

Frostiness between South Korea and Japan – both U.S. allies – and closer relations between South Korea and China have complicated Washington’s diplomacy in the region amid China’s continuing rise.  [LA TImes]

Here is why it is not in the interest of China or South Korea to resolve these issues with Japan:

At the same time, leaders in China and South Korea often see an advantage to stirring up nationalist, anti-Japan sentiments at home as a way of shoring up political support. Blatant anti-Japanese propaganda appears regularly in state-run media in China, for instance. And conflicting claims to uninhabited islands have also marred relations between Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul.

Whether the three nations now have the will to break their cycle of recriminations and defensiveness remains to be seen. World leaders from German Chancellor Angela Merkel to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon have been urging all three countries in recent weeks to forge a new path.

To be fair members of the Japanese government also use the historical issues to push their own domestic agendas as well.  Just visit the Yushukan Museum next to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo and see the absurd historical revisionism going on there that many on the Japanese far political right support.  If the Japanese government was serious about resolving these historical issues this is what I recommend they should do.