Presidential spokesperson Kang Yu-jung said Takaichi will make a two-day visit to Andong from May 19 to 20 to meet Lee. The two leaders are scheduled to hold both a small-group summit and an expanded summit, followed by a joint press announcement, a dinner and other informal events aimed at strengthening personal ties.
The visit is seen as a reciprocal gesture after Lee traveled to Nara Prefecture, Takaichi’s hometown, in January. That meeting marked the first summit between the two leaders earlier this year.
Lee was born in Andong in 1964. He graduated from elementary school there in 1976 before moving to Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province.
The upcoming summit will bring the two leaders together about four months after Lee’s January visit to Nara. Nara is where Takaichi was born and raised, and it is also her current constituency in Japan’s House of Representatives. Takaichi first won a seat there as an independent candidate in the 1993 general election and has since been elected 10 times.
Holding a summit in a leader’s political or personal hometown, rather than in the capital, is not without precedent in international diplomacy.
Ten years ago, in 2016, then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin for a summit in Nagato, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Abe’s electoral district. Chinese President Xi Jinping also invited Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Xi’an, his political base, instead of Beijing in 2015.
In his memoir published in 2023, Abe wrote that inviting a counterpart to one’s home rather than to a restaurant can make the other side feel that they have “won your heart.” He said this was why he invited Putin to Nagato, his family’s registered domicile and the place where his father’s grave is located.
U.S. President Donald Trump was also known for holding meetings with foreign leaders, including Abe, Xi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida instead of the White House.
The Andong meeting will be the third summit between Lee and Takaichi, following their first encounter at the APEC summit in Gyeongju last October and Lee’s visit to Nara in January.
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