By the end of the Group of 20 Osaka summit, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will have had one-on-one talks with as many as 16 world leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump, and even a member of a pop idol group.
But conspicuously absent from that flurry of meetings was a sit-down with the leader of one of Japan's closest neighbors: South Korean President Moon Jae-in.
Seoul had sounded out Tokyo about arranging a formal Moon-Abe meeting in Osaka, but Tokyo turned down the idea, citing the recently strained diplomatic relations between the two countries, in particular over wartime labor during Japan's colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.