Pressure kept on Seoul for intelligence pact with Japan

Tokyo and Washington continued to exert pressure on Seoul to keep an intelligence-sharing pact with Japan that is set to expire this weekend, with the top defense officials of the two countries stressing the pact's importance during a meeting on Monday.

Japanese Defense Minister Taro Kono and United States Defense Secretary Mark Esper reaffirmed the value of the intelligence arrangement when they met in Bangkok on the sidelines of the annual ASEAN Defense Ministers' Meeting-Plus. The event is part of the framework promoting practical defense cooperation between the 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and other countries including China, Japan and the US.

"We discussed a wide range of issues," Esper told reporters after the meeting.

During the one-hour meeting, Kono and Esper "agreed that the military cooperation between Japan and South Korea is vital for regional security, including their intelligence-sharing pact", an unidentified Japanese Defense Ministry official was quoted by Kyodo News as saying.

Tokyo and Washington had publicly made known their position one day after a tripartite meeting involving their defense officials and South Korea's defense chief Jeong Kyeong-doo. The meeting failed to narrow divisions over how to maintain the General Security of Military Information Agreement, also known as GSOMIA, which Seoul has been refusing to renew with the deadline on Saturday.

"There is an ongoing extremely tough situation between defense officials of the two nations, but I ask for a wise response from South Korea to improve the situation," Kono said.

In response, Jeong demanded that Japan first re-examine its tightening of controls on the export of high-tech materials to South Korea and emphasized that the country's decision to withdraw from GSOMIA was inevitable after Japan imposed the restrictions on exports.

"As Washington thinks maintaining the GSOMIA is important for trilateral security cooperation, the United States is pressuring not just Seoul but Japan as well to renew the pact," Jeong told reporters after the tripartite meeting.

Despite the lack of an agreement on the pact, the three countries released a joint statement on Sunday that they "shared the recognition that defense-related confidence-building among countries in the region is important, and committed to strengthening cooperation to institutionalize such efforts".

On Monday, Kono and Esper also discussed safety issues regarding the operations of US forces stationed in Japan following recent incidents, including parachute drop training at the US Kadena Air Base in Okinawa. Japan says these incidents are in breach of a bilateral agreement.

No mention was made of a reported US demand for Japan to quadruple annual payments for US forces stationed there to around $8 billion.

On Sunday, a Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman said the report was incorrect.

However, on Friday Esper called on the South Korean government to increase its share of the cost to support 28,500 US troops stationed on the Korean Peninsula.