As of: February 16, 2024, 5:53 p.m
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A historic meeting could be coming: Japan's prime minister wants to visit North Korea.
Positive signals come from Kim Jong-un's powerful sister.
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un's sister, Kim Yo-jong, is known for her tough rhetoric.
Surprisingly, however, she recently expressed a conciliatory attitude towards Japan, the traditional enemy of the isolated dictatorship.
She can imagine a "new common future" with the neighboring country, Kim said in a press release published by the state news agency KCNA on Thursday.
The statement was in response to an initiative by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
Earlier this month, Kishida announced that he would seek a meeting with Kim Jong-un.
Addressing the Japanese parliament, he stressed that it was "extremely important for me to take the initiative to build relationships at the highest level."
The Prime Minister urged “not to waste any time”.
Kim Yo-jong in August 2022: Kim Jong-un's sister sent a conciliatory message to Japan.
© AFP
According to a report in the
Financial Times
, citing government officials in Washington and Tokyo, Kishida intends the meeting to seek the release of Japanese hostages held in North Korea since the 1970s and 1980s.
Tokyo claims that North Korea is still preventing twelve Japanese citizens from leaving the country.
Pyongyang, however, says that eight of the alleged hostages have already died and the other four never set foot in North Korea.
North Korea last released five kidnapped Japanese people in 2002.
Kim Jong-un's sister Kim Yo-jong defends North Korea's weapons tests
The US supports Kishida's plans to visit North Korea.
“On the American side, we have made it clear that we are open to dialogue with the North Koreans without preconditions, and I think that also applies to our like-minded partners and our close allies,” said US special envoy for human rights issues in North Korea, Julie Turner, on Wednesday in Tokyo.
If Kishida can indeed arrange a meeting with Kim Jong-un, it would be the first meeting of a Japanese prime minister with a North Korean leader in 20 years.
Kim Yo-jong called Kishida's speech "positive if it were based on his real intention to boldly break free from the shackles of the past and promote relations between North Korea and Japan."
However, she stressed that this was just her "personal view" and that the North Korean government had "no interest" in contacting Tokyo.
Kim also clarified that the kidnapping issue was “already resolved.”
Kim Yo-jong also defended the weapons tests that North Korea has been carrying out for months and which have always been sharply criticized by Japan.
She argued that this was North Korea's "legitimate right to self-defense."
Pyongyang has conducted at least five cruise missile tests since the start of the year and reported testing an anti-ship missile as recently as Thursday.
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Japan and Korea: difficult history makes rapprochement difficult
Kim Yo-jong's statement is the second conciliatory signal towards Japan to come from Pyongyang this year.
At the beginning of January, dictator Kim Jong-un expressed his condolences in a rare gesture for the victims of the massive earthquake that killed more than 200 people on New Year's Day.
Japan and North Korea do not have formal diplomatic relations.
The Korean Peninsula was a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945.
During this time, countless Koreans were forced into forced labor and Korean women were abused as sex slaves by the Japanese occupiers.
This dark chapter in Japanese history has complicated rapprochement between Tokyo and Seoul for decades.
However, under the conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, the two countries have become closer again.
In addition, South Korea and Japan have strengthened their alliance with the USA.
This is happening against the background of the threat from Pyongyang and China's increasingly aggressive behavior in the region.
(sh)
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