South Korea's defence ministry Monday said the time was not ripe yet for signing a military intelligence pact with Japan.
The country's defence ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said in a press conference that the conditions for the intelligence pact with Japan have not been shaped yet, Xinhua reported.
Kim, however, stressed the need for such intelligence-sharing deals among allies to respond to the nuclear and missile threats from North Korea.
Seoul and Tokyo pushed for the bilateral pact to share military intelligence on North Korea in June 2012, but South Korea put the pact on hold at the last minute amid public uproar at home.
At that time, South Korea's then president Lee Myung-bak pushed the pact through without enough public debate for fear of possible opposition from the public.
"An MoU (memorandum of understanding) is being considered among defence ministers or defence intelligence chiefs of South Korea, Japan and the US instead of a bilateral agreement that could cause political controversy," said the spokesman.
The military intelligence pact was reached between Seoul and Washington and between Tokyo and Washington, but not between Seoul and Tokyo, he said.
Relations between South Korea and Japan have been frayed since Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe returned to power in December 2012.
South Korean President Park Geun-hye refused to hold a bilateral summit with Abe due to his cabinet's wrong perception of history.
Abe recently said that he and his cabinet would inherit the Kono and Murayama Statements, which led to a trilateral summit between Park, Abe and US President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit which is being held in The Hague in the Netherlands.
The Kono Statement acknowledged that the Japanese Imperial Army was involved in the recruitment of more than 200,000 young women and forced them to serve in brothels. The Murayama Statement apologised for sufferings caused by imperial Japan to its Asian neighbours during World War II.
