Japan makes abducted citizens a priority in talks with N Korea

Tokyo is expected to raise the unresolved issue of citizens it claims were taken by North Korean spies in the late 1970s and early 80s.

BEIJING // The fate of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea will be high on the agenda of talks between the two countries this year, the Japanese foreign minister said yesterday.

Pyongyang and Tokyo have yet to reach a settlement over a series of people allegedly seized in the late 1970s and early 1980s and taken to the secretive communist nation to teach North Korean spies how to pass themselves off as Japanese.

Japan's foreign minister, Seiji Maehara, said Pyongyang's nuclear programme would also be up for discussion at the talks, which come on top of an expected resumption of six-party negotiations on the issue.

"We have the abduction issue, which is related to Japan's sovereignty," Mr Maehara said. "It is important to create an environment that will allow us to hold talks on the abductions, missiles and nuclear weapons' issues between the two countries firmly and directly."

Japan says 17 citizens were abducted and taken to North Korea. A number have returned, and their children born in North Korea allowed to join them, but the status of others said by Pyongyang to have died, or never to have been abducted, remains a controversy.

"The abduction issue is still a political hot potato in Japan," said Alan Chong, an associate professor in the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. "People are passing on in years and they still hanker after knowing the fate of their relatives. Maybe [Japan] will offer North Korea food aid."

Japan and North Korea have held talks about establishing diplomatic relations, and Mr Chong said Tokyo was keen to pursue its own agenda without being tied too closely to the US and South Korean line at the six-party talks, which also involve Russia and China.

The talks, stalled since April 2009 when North Korea abandoned the process, seem likely to restart this year following comments from the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, indicating the forum was the best way of dealing with North Korea's nuclear programme.

A US diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks reported that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, told the Hyundai Group chairwoman, Hyun Jeong-eun, in August 2009 that relations with Japan were "far worse than ever before".

Relations continue to be affected by resentment over Japan's occupation of the Korean Peninsula in the first half of the 20th century.

While the nuclear issue is set to be part of the bilateral discussions, Japan was probably keen for direct talks in the hope Pyongyang will "come clean" over the fate of the abductees, said Chung Chienpeng, an associate professor of political science at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. "In the past, they've been told [at the six-party talks] to keep quiet by the other nations, to focus on denuclearisation rather than abductions, which should be a bilateral issue," he said.

Last month, Japan unveiled a defence strategy that will focus away from countering the threat of an invasion from Russia, to safeguarding its south-western areas close to China and improving anti-missile systems to counter perceived threats from North Korea.