US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was due yesterday in key ally Japan to lay the groundwork for talks on ending neighboring North Korea's nuclear program after a diplomatic standoff of more than a year.
Japan said it would tell Rice the six-nation nuclear talks should also try to pressure the Stalinist state to come clean on its past abductions of Japanese nationals, an emotional issue in Japan.
Rice has already visited China, the host of the North Korea talks, and today will head to South Korea on the tour which coincided with Pyongyang's announcement it was returning to the table from July 25 in Beijing.
North Korea fired a missile over Japan in 1998 and has repeatedly called for Tokyo to be kicked out of the nuclear talks due to its focus on Pyongyang's past abductions of Japanese nationals.
"North Korea has long refused to hold a bilateral meeting. We must use this opportunity to express our strong desire to seek a solution," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said yesterday when asked if Japan would bring up the kidnappings.
"Even if they say they do not want to listen, we must say it," Hosoda said.
Japan believes at least eight of its nationals whom North Korea snatched up to the 1980s to train its spies are alive and kept under wraps in the reclusive Stalinist state.
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who was expected to meet with Rice, has defied growing public calls for economic sanctions on North Korea.
The Japanese leader has invested political capital trying to engage North Korea, winning the release of five kidnap victims and their families in a 2002 summit in Pyongyang.
Senior US administration officials traveling with Rice, who was yesterday in the tsunami-hit Thai resort of Phuket ahead of her late arrival in Tokyo, said North Korea would respond at the nuclear talks to a year-old US proposal to end the crisis.
At the last round of talks in June last year, the US proposed that Pyongyang would get three months to shut down and seal its nuclear-weapons facilities in return for economic and diplomatic rewards and multilateral security guarantees.
But the North Koreans rejected the proposal, saying the upfront obligations would be excessive and the inspections intrusive.
While North Korea was due to be the main issue during Rice's day of talks in Tokyo, she was also expected to discuss an awkward dispute over US support for Japan to join the UN Security Council.
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