SEOUL, May 5 (Xinhuanet) -- South Korea's Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon flew to Japan Thursday for a regional forum between Asia and Europe as well as fence-mending talks with his Japanese counterpart, according to the South Korean national news agency Yonhap.

    Ban Ki-moon's meeting with Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura is to be held on the sidelines of a ministerial session of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) set for Friday and Saturday in the Japanese city of Kyoto.

    Friday's talks will be their second encounter since relations between the two countries were seriously frayed over Japan's territorial claim to Dokdo, a chain of rocky South Korean islets in the East Sea, also known as the Sea of Japan.

    Their earlier meeting, which took place in Pakistan in early April, turned awkward after Ban publicly chastised Machimura for backing Tokyo's approval of new school textbooks accused of minimizing Japan's wartime wrongdoing and describing Dokdo as Japanese.

    Few anticipate a breakthrough in this week's talks as Tokyo remains firm on its claim to the islets, something that Seoul has repeatedly vowed to fight to the end.

    Topics for the Ban-Machimura talks are also expected to includea planned meeting between President Roh Moo-hyun and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in late June.

    Officials of the two countries, including Ban and Machimura, have said they would make sure the dispute won't affect diplomaticand other scheduled exchanges, but Ban himself called off a scheduled trip to Tokyo in March in the face of rising anti-Japanese sentiment at home.

    Established in 1996, the ASEM is an intercontinental cooperation mechanism comprising the 10 members of the Associationof Southeast Asian Nations and the 25 members of the European Union, plus China, Japan, South Korea and the European Commission.

    The forum convenes a meeting of the heads of its member states every two years, with a ministerial meeting in between. Enditem