N. Korea: Japan proposes meeting
Sides want relations, but conditions exist
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Monday that Japan’s prime minister has offered to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un but stressed that prospects for their countries’ first summit in about 20 years would depend on Tokyo tolerating the North’s weapons program and ignoring its past abductions of Japanese nationals.
Japan acknowledged it has been trying to arrange a bilateral summit but dismissed North Korea’s preconditions for such a meeting as unacceptable, dimming the prospects that Kim and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida would hold a summit anytime soon.
Observers say Kim wants improved ties with Japan as a way to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its allies, while Kishida wants to use possible progress in the abduction issue, a highly emotional issue for Japan, to boost his declining approval rating at home. After admitting in 2002 that it had abducted 13 Japanese nationals, North Korea allowed five to return home but said the others had died. Japan believes some were still alive.
In a statement carried by state media, Kim’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, who also is a senior official, said that Kishida recently used an unspecified channel to convey his position that he wants to meet Kim Jong Un in person “as soon as possible.”
She said there would be no breakthrough in North Korea-japan relations as long as Kishida’s government is engrossed in the abduction issue and interferes in the North’s “exercise of our sovereign right,” apparently referring to the North’s weapons testing activities. Simply deciding to hold a summit is not enough to improve “relations full of distrust and misunderstanding,” she said.