North Korea appears willing to improve its ties with Japan although it remains adamant on a bitter dispute over its kidnapping of Japanese nationals, officials here said yesterday.
"We must positively accept the feeling that North Korea is making various moves," Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Ichiro Aizawa said in a television talk show, citing recent signs from Pyongyang on the kidnap issue.
He added that North Korea still refused to hold government-level talks on the abduction of Japanese during the Cold War years to use them for training spies in Japanese customs and language.
Aizawa was commenting the day after four Japanese diplomats ended a visit to Pyongyang, the first by Tokyo government officials in 15 months, which was initially welcomed here as a sign of change on North Korea's part.
The visit was primarily arranged for the team to meet a 42-year-old Japanese gangster who has been held on drug smuggling charges for three months. They also interviewed a 29-year-old Japanese woman who entered North Korea seeking asylum in October.
The team tried in vain to bring up Tokyo's demand that Pyongyang allow the immediate relatives of five Japanese kidnap victims to visit Japan for their reunion, Aizawa said.
The victims in their 40s -- two married couples and the wife of a US army deserter -- returned to Japan in October, 2002, after 24 years in North Korea and refused to go back to the impoverished Stalinist state.
They have remained separated from immediate relatives, seven children and the American husband.
North Korean foreign ministry officials, who talked with the Japanese diplomats, insisted that Japan must send the five kidnap victims back to Pyongyang in accordance with that they called a prior agreement.
Tokyo has denied there was such an accord.
"But they calmly and politely listened to our representation. They duly took notes and promised to report it to their seniors," Aizawa said, adding that the atmosphere was different from previous contacts which often ended in angry exchanges.
The visit came a month after North Korean officials met a Japanese ruling party lawmaker, Katsuei Hirasawa, in Beijing and offered a face-saving solution to the abduction issue.
They proposed that the five kidnap victims come to Pyongyang's airport and meet their immediate relatives there, Hirasawa told the same talk show on the TV Asahi network. The relatives may go to Japan with the former abductees if they so wish, he said.
Hirasawa added that the North Korean side put the same proposal to an unofficial US delegation that inspected nuclear facilities in North Korea earlier this month.
"It has signalled a big change because they acknowledge that the abduction issue remains unsettled," said Hirasawa.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il apologized for the abduction when he met Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in Pyongyang in September, 2002.
The resolution of the dispute could lead to a rapprochement between the two countries and bring massive Japanese economic aid to Pyongyang.
But Japan has resolving the abduction issue as one of its top priorities in dealing with Pyongyang, along with eliminating its suspected nuclear weapons.
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