Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will attend a series of meetings on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York this week, with attention centering on whether Japan will be cold-shouldered by China and South Korea.

Tokyo is attempting to arrange meetings between Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida and his Chinese and South Korean counterparts to lay the groundwork for Abe's first official one-on-one summits with the two countries' respective leaders since he took office in 2012.

Abe is chasing separate tete-a-tetes with Chinese President Xi Jinping and South Korean President Park Geun-hye during November's confab of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, to be hosted in Beijing.