Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida calls for summit with Kim Jong Un: North Korea

Fumio Kishida says he wants to change relations between Japan and North Korea

The sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said on Monday that Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida had requested a summit with her brother, adding that any meeting was unlikely if Tokyo did not change its policy.

“Kishida recently expressed his desire to meet with the Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as soon as possible,” Kim Yo Jong said in a statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency.

Relations between the two countries have long been troubled by issues including compensation for Japan’s brutal occupation of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945 and, more recently, Pyongyang’s missile launches into Japanese territory.

North Korean agents who kidnapped Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s and were forced to train spies in Japanese language and customs have also long been a source of controversy.

Kishida, who has said he wants to change relations between Tokyo and Pyongyang and last year expressed a desire to meet the North Korean leader “without preconditions,” told the U.N. General Assembly that Tokyo was willing to resolve all issues, including the kidnappings.

Last month, Kim Yo Jong, one of the North Korean regime’s leading spokespersons, hinted that the Japanese leader might be invited to visit North Korea in the future.

“The most important thing in formulating a new charter for North Korea-Japan relations is Japan’s political decision,” she said on Monday.

kidnapping problem

“If Japan attempts to interfere with our exercise of sovereignty as it does now and is resolutely focused on the abduction problem that we cannot solve or understand, then it will inevitably face the reputation that the prime minister’s plan is nothing more than an attempt to attract popularity,” she says.

North Korea admitted in 2002 that it had sent agents to kidnap 13 Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s, who were used to train spies in Japanese language and customs.

Kidnappings remain a serious and emotive issue in Japan, and suspicion remains that more people have been abducted than officially acknowledged.

Analysts have long said the dispute over the issue could hamper progress on a summit between Kishida and Kim.

Kim Yo Jong said Kishida “must know that he cannot agree to such a meeting just because he wants to or has decided to meet with our leadership, or just because we will.”

She said: “If Japan sincerely hopes to improve relations between the two countries, become our close neighbor, and contribute to ensuring regional peace and stability, it needs to have the political courage to make strategic choices that are in line with its national interests.”

In 2002, former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi made a landmark visit to Pyongyang during his tenure, meeting Kim Jong Il’s father, Kim Jong Il, and charting a path to normalizing relations in which Japan would provide economic aid.

The visit resulted in the return of five Japanese nationals and a follow-up visit by Koizumi, but diplomacy soon broke down, in part because of Tokyo’s concerns that North Korea had not come clean about its kidnapping victims.

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