As early as the 1980s, exchanges on the institutional level between the Institute of Journalism and Communication Studies (IJCS) of the University of Tokyo and the Department of Communication of the Seoul National University (SNU) had already started, through such activities as comparative research on Japanese and Korean news coverage of the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. This exchange became more active after the IJCS underwent a major reorganization and was renamed the Institute of Socio-Information and Communication Studies (ISICS). In 1996, the two universities launched an annual international symposium to be held alternately at the University of Tokyo and Seoul National University.

Since the year 2004, following the merger of ISICS with III/GSII, graduate school students from both universities have participated in the symposium as speakers.

In 2016, the 20^th-anniversary symposium was held in Seoul, at which two faculty members of National Chengchi University (NCCU) of Taiwan were present as observers. NCCU became a full member of the symposium in 2017 and the event has developed as the UT-SNU-NCCU international symposium since then.