It is official now that the GSOMIA has now been restored between Tokyo and Seoul:
South Korea on Tuesday fully restored its military intelligence-sharing pact with Tokyo, the foreign ministry said, as part of efforts to thaw long-frozen ties following a recent bilateral summit.
South Korea sent an official letter to Japan earlier in the day via diplomatic channels informing of its decision to fully restore the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) between the neighbors, the ministry said.
Signed in 2016, GSOMIA was seen as a rare symbol of security cooperation between Seoul and Tokyo before the former administration of President Moon Jae-in decided to terminate it in 2019 in protest of Japan’s export restrictions against South Korea.
The decision to suspend the pact was later put on hold, but the amount of information sharing between the neighboring countries is thought to have been limited, as their relations remained strained over disputes stemming from Japan’s colonial rule.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
Maybe the Japanese Navy should start sailing around some of China’s man-made islands in the South China Sea in response to this latest violation of Japanese territory:
Tokyo lodged a series of diplomatic protests with Beijing last week after China sent several coast guard vessels, including one armed with a deck-mounted machine gun, near its islets in the East China Sea.
Four Chinese coast guard ships passed the 12-mile territorial limit around the Senkakus eight times in three separate incidents on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, a Japanese coast guard spokesman told Stars and Stripes by phone Monday. Each ship stayed in those waters for less than 24 hours and left without incident.
Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs complained to the Chinese Embassy in Japan and to officials in Beijing on all three days, a ministry spokesman said by phone Monday.
Stars & Stripes
You can read more at the link.
This should come as no surprise that Koreans want to work less hours, who wouldn’t want less hours if it meant the same pay? I would like to read what the results of this survey would be if the employees were told they would make less money if working the lesser hours. I think the results would be very different:
While the government has been pushing to extend a mandatory 52-hour cap on the country’s 40-hour basic workweek, a recent survey showed that people actually wish to work less than 40 hours per week.
Korea Times
The Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (KIHASA) unveiled the results of its survey on work-life balance, Sunday, after interviewing 22,000 people aged between 19 and 59 from Sept. 20 to Oct. 7 last year.
The results showed that people wished to work 36.7 hours a week on average: regular employees wished to work 37.63 hours a week, while temporary and daily employed workers wished to work 32.36 hours a week.
This survey was done in response to the government’s proposal to add flexibility to the current 52 hour work week cap:
Billing the plan as offering flexibility beyond the mandatory 52-hour cap on the workweek, introduced by the previous Moon Jae-in administration, the ministry said it is seeking to extend the maximum weekly work hours to 69 during times of heavy workload.
The ministry noted that workers will be granted longer vacations in return for overtime worked. But many labor and civic groups have raised doubts about this.
To me this seems like big business trying to get government to help them avoid paying overtime wages during periods of heavy workload. The companies are offering extra vacation days in exchange that the article explains many Korean workers are not allowed to take the vacation days they already have off.
Here is an update of one of the events occurring as part of the Freedom Shield exercise that has North Korea so upset:
South Korea and the United States are conducting combined high-tech military drills with increased “intensity and realism,” the Army here said Monday, as part of joint efforts to bolster deterrence against growing North Korean threats.
The drills are under way at the Korea Combat Training Center (KCTC), a facility employing cutting-edge technologies for realistic ground drills, in Inje, 165 kilometers east of Seoul. The maneuvers are to run through Friday, in connection with the allies’ ongoing Freedom Shield exercise.
For the drills, the U.S. military deployed a battalion-size unit for the first time. The South mobilized wheeled-armored vehicles and reconnaissance drones, while the U.S. brought Stryker armored vehicles and other assets.
The latest drills are divided into two three-day parts of separate defense and attack operations to heighten its “intensity and realism,” according to the armed service. Previous KCTC sessions were held for four days in total.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
The usual suspects out protesting increasingly cooperation between South Korea and Japan:
Political strife escalated Saturday over the recent South Korea-Japan summit, as the liberal opposition took to the streets blasting President Yoon Suk Yeol for cozying up to Tokyo and looking past historical disputes on wartime forced labor.
Yoon held a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Tokyo on Thursday to mend ties strained by historical disputes stemming from Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula from 1910-45.
Earlier this month, South Korea announced its plan to compensate the victims of wartime forced labor through a foundation with donations from domestic companies and not the accused Japanese firms, a move opposed by the victims, opposition parties and activists.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but where were these activists and protesters when the last Korean president Moon Jae-in was cozying up to Kim Jong-un? He is in charge of regime that has killed far more Koreans than Imperial Japan could ever dream of. Additionally Kim Jong-un is in charge of regime that continues to regularly threaten South Korea with annihilation and enslaves a large amount of Koreans in labor camps among other human rights violations.
Yet these activists are more concerned about stopping cooperation with a country that actually wants to help South Korea defend itself from annihilation from North Korea. This is despite Japan’s transgressions happening 75+ years ago that they have repeatedly apologized and made compensation for. Where is North Korea’s apologies and compensation for all the destruction and deaths they have committed against South Korea in the 75+ years since World War II?
When the Korean left starts making demands for apologies and compensation from North Korea then maybe I will take their claims against Japan seriously.
