Vice foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan were to meet in Seoul on Monday to discuss an array of bilateral and regional issues, Seoul's foreign ministry said, amid strained ties sparked by long-running disputes over territory and history.
   
Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Akitaka Saiki will arrive in Seoul later in the day for a one-day visit to have talks with Cho Tae-yong, a South Korean vice foreign minister, according to the foreign ministry.
   
The rare meeting is reportedly to be held at the request of Japan ahead of the new year, the 50th anniversary of the normalization of Seoul-Tokyo relations. It also marks the 70th anniversary of Seoul's liberation from Tokyo's colonial rule.
   
The Seoul-Tokyo ties have been at their lowest ebb in recent years due to Japan's attempts to deny its wartime atrocities, such as sex slavery and its territorial claims to South Korea's easternmost islets of Dokdo.
   
Cho and Saiki held a strategic dialogue in Tokyo on Oct. 1, the first in nearly two years. At that time, Cho called on Japan to make sincere efforts to address the historical wounds of Tokyo's forceful sexual enslavement of Korean women for future-oriented bilateral ties.
   
South Korean President Park Geun-hye has shunned a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe due to Tokyo's refusal to show sincerity toward the matter of history.
   
Despite the chilled bilateral ties, Park made a surprise offer to hold a summit with the leaders of China and Japan during a regional summit in Myanmar in November to keep alive momentum for three-way cooperation.
   
The three countries have pushed to hold foreign ministers' talks to pave the way for the resumption of a trilateral summit, which has been put on hold since May 2012. But no major headway has been made because Japan had been busy with an election until mid-December. (Yonhap)