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Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe was on Wednesday elected president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. As soon as the Diet endorses him as the new prime minister next Tuesday, the Abe Cabinet will be launched and the Junchiro Koizumi administration, which has led Japan for five years and five months, will at long last come to an end. The Korean Foreign Ministry on Wednesday said it hopes that Korea and Japan will resolve causes of conflict and pursue future-oriented friendly relations henceforth.

Korea is watching the new Japanese prime minister closely because Seoul-Tokyo relations were the worst in their contemporary history under Koizumi, whose foreign policy laid disproportionate emphasis on the U.S. and made light of Asia. During his tenure, Japan stirred up incessant trouble with South Korea and China, over his visits to the militarist Yasukuni Shrine, over distortions in history textbooks, over territorial claims to Korea’s Dokdo islets.

The first task of the new premier will be to repair Japan's tattered relations with its Asian neighbors. Until early this year, Abe made remarks supporting Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine and tended to an ultra-nationalist view of history. If he continues to act with contempt of his country’s neighbors for the sake of domestic politics even after assuming the premiership, it will spell disaster for Asia.

From our perspective, too, ties have to be urgently restored. Mutual support between Seoul, Washington and Tokyo, which has been a platform for us to be heard in the international community, has virtually stopped functioning. Since Seoul expressed positions different from the U.S. and Japan, we have become a loner on the Northeast Asian diplomatic stage, and the North Korean problem is getting more and more tangled. South Korea, the U.S. and Japan are slated to meet over North Korea in New York next week. Reports have it that a Seoul-Tokyo summit may be held on the sidelines of the November Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. With the start of the Abe government as a momentum, South Korea and Japan should sit down face to face again, with a new mindset and new diplomatic strategies.