BEIJING: Japan and North Korea yesterday held the first formal government-level talks in more than a year following a shift in Pyongyang’s handling of past abductions of Japanese citizens.
The two-day meeting in Beijing came after diplomats held informal talks on the sidelines of a humanitarian conference in the Chinese city of Shenyang between Red Cross officials from the two countries earlier this month.
“We would like to have serious and frank discussions over a broad range of outstanding issues for both sides,” Junichi Ihara, head of the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, told Japan’s NHK public broadcaster.
“We would like to make efforts so as to make progress towards solving those issues.”
Song Il-Ho, North Korea’s ambassador for talks to normalise relations with Japan, replied: “I completely feel the same way,” Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported.
At the North Korean embassy, the venue of the first day of the meeting, Song expressed hope that relations between the two countries will start moving “in a positive direction,” Kyodo said.
Song also compared the resumption of governmental dialogue to the arrival of spring, “when icy rivers melt and water begins to flow,” Kyodo reported.
Japan berates Xi over Nanjing remarks
TOKYO: Tokyo yesterday criticised Chinese President Xi Jinping for making remarks during a trip to Germany about Japan’s wartime atrocities, adding that the government had lodged a protest.
At a think tank forum on Friday in Berlin, Xi criticised Japan’s wartime atrocities, saying the Japanese military killed more than 300,000 people in Nanjing in 1937 when it occupied the Chinese city, Jiji Press and Kyodo News reported.
Xi also said more than 35 million Chinese people were killed or injured as Japan waged a war of aggression stemming from its militarism, Kyodo said.
Agencies
