The Japanese prime minister is open to a summit regarding the case of 17 Japanese nationals, a matter that has dragged on since the 1970s. The last meeting between North Korean and Japanese leaders was in 2004 when Junichiro Koizumi was Japan’s prime minister. For its part, Pyongyang considers the matter closed. Meanwhile, the defence ministers of South Korea and the United States made their first joint visit to the Demilitarised Zone since 2017.
Tokyo (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi today said that she asked North Korea to hold a summit with its leader, Kim Jong-un, to address the decades-old issue of Japanese citizens held by North Korea.
The official position of the Japanese government is that 17 Japanese nationals were abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, and suspects Pyongyang’s involvement in many other cases of missing persons.
Five abductees were repatriated in October 2002, following historic talks in Pyongyang between then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and then-Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
Koizumi returned to Pyongyang in 2004 to meet with Kim, but no summits between the two countries’ leaders have been held ever since.
In 2014, North Korea – with which Japan has no formal diplomatic relations – agreed to reopen the investigation into the case of abducted Japanese citizens, but the inquiry was suspended after Japan tightened sanctions against North Korea following the latter’s 2016 nuclear test.
North Korean authorities today claim that the issue of the abductions has already been resolved.
“I will do everything during my term to have a breakthrough and resolve the matter,” Takaichi said today during a meeting dedicated to the matter, adding, that “the lives of victims and national sovereignty [are] at stake”.
The issue was also discussed during US President Donald Trump’s recent visit to Tokyo, where he met with some of the relatives of the kidnapped victims.
Takaichi promised to work closely with the United States and other countries to pave the way for a solution, expressing hope that the matter will be resolved while the families of those missing are “still in good health.”
Sakie Yokota, 89, mother of Megumi Yokota, who was kidnapped at the age of 13, is now the only surviving parent among the relatives of the missing.
Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi’s statement came on the same day that South Korean and US Defence Ministers Ahn Gyu-back and Pete Hegseth visited the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), which separates the two Koreas, amid calls from Seoul and Washington for Pyongyang to resume negotiations.
The two ministers visited the Observation Post Ouellette, a United Nations Command military facility located near the DMZ. This was the first joint visit to the buffer zone by the two countries’ defence ministers since October 2017.
The DMZ runs for 250 kilometres and is approximately four kilometres wide, serving as a buffer zone separating the two Koreas, which remain technically at war since the 1950-1953 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.