Minister Park Yang-woo of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST), Japanese Culture Minister Masahiko Shibayama, and Chinese Minister of Culture Luo Shugang join hands during their meeting at the Songdo ConventiA in Incheon on Aug. 30. (Photo: MCST)

Despite the frozen Korean-Japanese relations, the Korean, Chinese and Japanese culture ministers joined forces in expanding exchanges.

Minister Park Yang-woo of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST), Japanese Culture Minister Masahiko Shibayama, and Chinese Minister of Culture Luo Shugang announced the “Incheon declaration,” which is designed to expand cultural exchanges following their meeting at the Songdo ConventiA in Incheon on Aug. 30. MCST Minister Park presided over the 11th Korean, Chinese and Japanese culture ministers’ meeting.

The statement confirmed that Korean, Chinese and Japanese culture ministers’ meetings have improved each other’s cultural diversity and contributed to building peace in the East Asian region for the past 10 years. It said they agreed to work out ways of promoting future youth exchanges and culture cooperation in an era of the 4th Industrial Revolution.

As PyeongChang, Tokyo and Beijing are the venues of the 2018 Winter Olympics, 2020 Summer Olympics and 2022 Winter Olympics, it said the three countries agreed to continue joint cultural programs as they did during the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics. Praising cooperation among national museums and art museums that have successfully collaborated, they agreed to promote exchanges and cooperation among civilian art institutions.

Recognizing the importance of the cultural industry, the three countries also agreed to support a Korean-Chinese-Japanese cultural industry content forum to boost growth in the cultural industry and ramp up exchanges and cooperation to protect mutual copyrights.

The cultural cities of East Asia for 2020 designated to promote various events for cultural exchanges are Suncheon, Jeollanam-do; Yangju, China; and Kitakyushu, Japan.

In a keynote speech, MCST Minister Park said, “We hope that the three countries will enhance cultural inclusion by jointly tackling pending issues and tasks through cultural cooperation, thus leading to co-prosperity of the three countries and peace and co-existence of the East Asian community.”