A pile picture on Japanese tourists at a South Korean airport. [Yonhap News Photo]
More than 10,000 Japanese tourists will visit South Korea for incentive group tours between this fall and next spring amid signs that the two countries are moving cautiously to improve frozen ties.
A major Japanese funeral service company has agreed to send its employees to South Korea for six months starting on October 16, the state-run Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) said Wednesday. This would be the largest number of travelers on an incentive tour program from Japan.
About 10,000 employees will visit the southern port city of Busan and nearby tourist attractions while 1,000 others will visit Seoul.
The agreement came as Seoul and Beijing were locked in a diplomatic row over the deployment of an advanced US missile shield aimed at intercepting North Korean ballistic missiles. The dispute has fanned jitters in South Korea that China may take retaliatory steps.
KTO data showed about 8.1 million foreigners visited South Korea in the first six months of this year, up 21.5 percent from a year earlier. The total included 3.81 million Chinese visitors. Over the same period, the number of Japanese travelers stood at 1.04 million, up 10 percent from a year earlier ago that marked growth for the first time since October 2012.
Ties between Seoul and Tokyo have soured due to territorial and historical disputes. Many South Koreans still harbor deep resentment against Japan over its 1910-45 colonial rule, and Seoul wants Tokyo to make a sincere apology and make amends for past wrongdoings.
Since her swearing-in in early 2013, South Koran President Park Geun-hye has spent a large part of her annual Liberation Day speech on Japan.
In her speech on August 15 this year to mark an end to Japan's colonial rule, however, Japan-related content was reduced to a mere one sentence that bilateral relations should be "remade toward a future-oriented one while looking squarely at history". Many analysts saw her speech as an indication that Seoul may revise its rigid stance against Tokyo.
South Korea and Japan reached a landmark accord last December on the sensitive issue of Korean women forced to work in Japanese wartime military brothels. Tokyo agreed to provide one billion yen (8.9 million US dollars) for a foundation to be established in South Korea to support the surviving victims.
Aju News Lim Chang-won = cwlim34@ajunews.com
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
