Photo : KBS News
South Korea and Japan will hold talks Friday to discuss the joint development of an underwater continental shelf believed to hold deposits of oil and other natural resources, marking the first such meeting in nearly four decades.
Seoul’s foreign ministry said Thursday that the joint committee established under a 1974 joint development zone(JDZ) agreement between the two countries will hold its sixth meeting Friday in Tokyo.
The committee’s fifth meeting was in 1985.
The Friday talks will be led by Hwang Jun-shik, director general for international legal affairs with the South Korean foreign ministry, and Akihiro Okochi, deputy director general for Asian and Oceanian affairs at Japan’s foreign ministry.
South Korea and Japan signed the JDZ agreement in 1974 to pursue the joint exploration and development of the Block 7 continental shelf in the East China Sea.
The joint committee was supposed to meet at least once a year.
A foreign ministry official said the two sides will engage in comprehensive talks on the implementation of the JDZ agreement.