South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol will attend a meeting of ASEAN and the Group of 20 industrialized nations this month, a senior administration official said on Wednesday. South Korea is organizing a possible bilateral summit between Yoon and US President Joe Biden as well as a trilateral summit involving the United States and Japan on the sidelines, according to South Korean news agency Yonhap.
“We are holding summits with key countries on the occasion of participating in the ASEAN and G20 meetings,” Yoon’s national security adviser Kim Sung-han said at a briefing. Nothing has been decided on a possible one-on-one meeting between Yoon and Japanese Prime Minister Fumi Kishida, Yonhap said.
The last face-to-face meeting between Yoon and Kishida was in September. The two leaders then agreed on the need to improve relations plagued by historical disputes. Yoon, who took office in May, is keen to improve relations with Tokyo at a time when both countries face growing nuclear and missile threats from North Korea. The September meeting, held in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, was the first between the leaders of the two countries since 2019.