China on Thursday confirmed Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi’s official visit on April 1-2 to meet his counterpart Qin Ganga.
The head of Japan’s diplomacy will become the first official from that country to travel to Beijing since 2019.
Hayashi said that he hopes to hold deep, candid talks leading to the stable and constructive development of bilateral ties, on which friction is currently weighing due to differences on various fronts. However, he spoke of his intention to underline Tokyo’s position on some issues.
This visit will take place in a context of discrepancies over the announced dumping of toxic water from Fukushima into the sea, Japan’s military plans under the argument of counteracting the supposed Chinese threat and the arrest here of a citizen suspected of espionage.
Since the end of 2017, China and Japan have made progress in rapprochement with reciprocal visits by their foreign ministers, the resumption of intergovernmental dialogue on economic issues and the establishment of a mechanism between the defense ministries.
In October 2018, the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in Beijing and thus sealed a series of bilateral contacts aimed at turning the page on the territorial and economic disputes that distanced the two neighbors for years.
Experts then valued this key process and agreed that it was a golden opportunity for the two most important powers in East Asia to iron out their rough edges once and for all, thus contributing to the prosperity and stability of the region.
