Japanese and South Korean navies hold first joint drills in nine years

Japan and South Korea’s navies have held their first joint training in nearly nine years, the Maritime Self-Defense Force announced Monday, in a move Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi hailed as signaling “a new chapter” in bilateral defense cooperation.

The search-and-rescue exercise, conducted in waters west of the Goto Islands on Sunday, saw the Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) dispatch its Kongo destroyer and an SH-60K helicopter for the drill with the South Korean Navy’s Cheon Ja Bong landing ship. 

The drills — the first since December 2017 — were seen as a key sign of warming ties between the neighbors’ militaries. The rescue exercises, which began on a regular basis in 1999, had been suspended amid bilateral tensions in the wake of an incident involving a South Korean naval vessel directing its fire-control radar at an MSDF plane in 2018.