ONUS ON JAPAN

Observers agree that Japan was to blame for the breakdown of the trilateral summitry, whose last session -- the fifth -- took place in Beijing in 2012.

In essence, it was the various problems caused by Tokyo's wrong approach to history that eventually led to the suspension, said Han, who also pointed to Japan's separate territorial disputes with China and South Korea.

Haba, who is a Ph.D. of international relations, attributed the hiatus to a serious aggravation of Japan's relations with China and South Korea prompted mainly by Tokyo's so-called "nationalization" of Diaoyu Islands and the rightward slide of the Abe administration.

She pointed out that in the wake of its highly controversial lifting of the ban on exercising collective self-defense, the Abe government has seen its popularity on the skids and thus, in order to arrest the decline, has to mend fences with Japan's neighbors.

The Japanese government, said Yazaki Mitsuharu, head of the secretariat of Japan-China Friendship Association, should from now on try to earn the trust of China and South Korea with right words and actions and roll out practical measures to promote regional cooperation.

He also called upon Tokyo to shift the focus of its foreign policy from the United States to East Asia and make concerted efforts with Beijing and Seoul to promote regional development and world peace.

Japan, he added, also needs to respond positively to such regional initiatives and visions as the Asian Infrastructure Invest Bank, the Belt and Road Initiative and the construction of a Northeast Asian community of common destiny.