South Korea and Japan will hold a director general meeting this week to discuss bilateral issues, including Tokyo’s move to strengthen its quarantine inspection of South Korean seafood imports. 

A senior official of Seoul’s Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that the ministry’s director general for Asian and Pacific affairs Kim Jung-han, and director general of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau Kenji Kanasugi will meet in Tokyo on Wednesday. 

They are expected to discuss plans announced last week by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare that it will expand monitoring inspections currently applied to 20 percent of South Korean halibut imports. 

The Japanese government said the move is to prevent food poisoning, but there has been speculation it's a retaliatory measure over the World Trade Organization’s recent decision to uphold Seoul's ban on fishery imports from eight Japanese prefectures around Fukushima following the 2011 nuclear disaster.

The meeting is also expected to focus on the possibility of holding a bilateral summit on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Osaka this month as well as the South Korean top court's decisions against Japanese firms implicated in Japan’s wartime forced labor. 

The Foreign Ministry official said no decisions have been made yet on whether a summit or a foreign ministers’ meeting between South Korea and Japan can be arranged in time for the G20 Summit.