South Korea says Japan flatly rejects meeting over trade row

South Korea's deputy trade minister Kim Seung-ho said on Wednesday he had asked a senior Japanese official for a face-to-face meeting on a trade row between Tokyo and Seoul but he had been flatly turned down.

Kim said Japan was using trade to settle a diplomatic score, and the refusal of a meeting with Shingo Yamagami, the director-general of the economic bureau at Japan's Foreign Ministry, showed Tokyo lacked the courage to face up to what it had done.