Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida reiterated on Thursday his determination to work towards a summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to achieve the return of Japanese believed to have been abducted by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s.
“I remain committed to achieving this goal for Japan,” he told reporters. But he declined to directly respond to recent comments from North Korea, which said such a meeting would only be possible if Japan stopped pursuing the abduction issue.
Speaking at a news conference after the government budget passed parliament, Kishida stressed that he was directly involved in high-level talks to resolve various bilateral issues amid growing concerns about neighboring North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapons programs.
In 2002, Kim Jong Un’s late father, Kim Jong Il, told then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that his agents kidnapped 13 Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s and allowed five of them to return to Japan.
Japan believes hundreds more people may have been abducted during this period, some of whom are still alive. Koizumi visited North Korea for the second time in 2004, which was the last summit between the two countries.
Kishida, who has been prime minister since 2021, also pledged to pull Japan out of decades of deflation and trigger a “positive cycle” of rising wages, corporate profits and strong productivity.
“We have a historic opportunity to escape deflation,” Kishida said, noting that the changes would come under his “new capitalism” plan, which is based on economic changes such as a more mobile workforce, investments in artificial intelligence and revenue growth. middle class.
He promised that legal revisions and internal investigations were underway to deal with the emerging scandal surrounding political funding, which ruling party lawmakers allegedly obtained secretly through improper means such as tickets to expensive fundraising parties.
Kishida said more time was needed to sort out the details, but politicians who made mistakes would be punished to restore public trust.
Kishida’s approval ratings have plunged to record lows in recent months amid the scandal. But even if he is ousted, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is likely to emerge with another leader because the opposition is weak and fragmented.
Experts even speculate that Japan will have its first female prime minister, such as Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike. As a woman, Yuriko Koike will be seen as a change, although she’s unlikely to stray too far from the status quo.
Japan’s prime ministers are almost always members of the lower house, so Yuriko Koike would need to run for a seat and give up the mayoralty. After World War II, apart from brief periods of opposition control, the LDP ruled Japan almost uninterruptedly.
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Kageyama Yuri on X:
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