President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida agreed Sunday to allow a group of South Korean experts to visit Japan to inspect the planned release of radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, both sides said.
Yoon and Kishida announced the agreement during a joint press conference following a summit in Seoul.
“With regard to the contaminated water from Fukushima, we agreed on the dispatch of an on-site inspection team of South Korean experts,” Yoon said during the press conference at the presidential office.
“I hope a meaningful step will be achieved in consideration of our people’s demands for a science-based and objective inspection,” he said.
The two leaders met in Seoul for their second summit in less than two months, a highly symbolic meeting demonstrating the neighboring nations are firmly on course to the full restoration of long-frayed relations.
Kishida said the Japanese government’s commitment to inheriting past administrations’ positions on the two countries’ shared history is “unwavering.”
He also said his “heart aches” for the Korean people who suffered under Tokyo’s 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.
Source: Yonhap News Agency