Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and a prominent politician herself, has dismissed the idea of her brother meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, according to North Korea’s state media.
A summit meeting of the kind Japan requested “is not a matter of concern” for Pyongyang any longer, Kim Yo Jong said in a statement published Tuesday by the Korean Central News Agency. Tokyo had “no courage to change history … and take the first step for fresh [North Korea]-Japan relations,” she said, according to KCNA.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi acknowledged on Monday a KCNA report that Kishida had asked to meet with Kim “as soon as possible.”
The Japanese government had been reaching out to North Korea to resolve lingering issues, namely the communist regime’s abduction of Japanese citizens and its continued weapons tests, Hayashi said. The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs alleges North Korea abducted 17 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s.
Then-North Korean leader Kim Jong Il on Sept. 17, 2002, admitted and apologized for 13 abductions during the first Japan-North Korea summit with then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Five surviving abductees were returned to Japan one month after that summit.
At a second summit May 22, 2004, in Pyongyang, the abductees’ North Korean family members were permitted to rejoin them in Japan. North Korea has since claimed that all the abductees were returned to Japan and that the matter is settled.
Read more at: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2024-03-27/north-korea-kim-yo-jong-japan-kishida-13437176.html
Source – Stars and Stripes
