Japan is arranging to send Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi to South Korea to attend President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol's inauguration ceremony next week, government sources said Monday.
Seoul had hoped that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida would attend the event on May 10, seeing it as a move that could help improve their countries' soured relations, according to the sources.
But Tokyo has decided that the Japanese leader cannot go without any guarantee of making progress on disputes between the two neighbors, which date back to Japan's 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, the sources said.