The Korean and Japanese troops have offered humanitarian assistance to rebuild areas in Carrefour, near Haitai's capital, Port-au-Prince, since Friday, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement.
Colonel Kim Su-seong, chief of the 240-member Korean unit in Haiti, described the joint mission with the roughly 350-member Japanese unit under the name of the United Nations peacekeeping operations as historically significant.
"It's historically meaningful that Korean and Japanese troops work together for a reconstruction mission overseas," Kim was quoted as saying in the statement.
Colonel Masashi Fukunaga, head of the Japanese unit, said he hoped the joint mission would serve as a chance to expand military cooperation between South Korea and Japan, the statement cited.
Despite their close economic ties, South Korea and Japan have had limited contact and exchanges in the military area. Japan ruled the Korean Peninsula as a colony from 1910 to 1945.
The two neighbors have only recently started exchanging visits of their defense chiefs and launched joint maritime rescue and relief exercises that involve naval ships.
South Korea sent the 240 soldiers, mostly engineers, to Haiti in February to help rebuild the country hit by a catastrophic earthquake in January.
The deployment marks South Korea's sixth U.N. peacekeeping mission after Somalia, the Western Sahara, Angola, East Timor and Lebanon. The unit is named "Danbi," a Korean word meaning "sweet rain after a long drought."//Yonhap
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com