North Korea said on Tuesday that talks with Japan this month should include a demand for compensation for wartime Korean sex slaves and not only the issue of Japanese abducted decades ago, which it considers closed.
But So Se Pyong, North Korea's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, said he hoped that the "sensitive" high-level talks being held in Beijing on March 30-31, the first in more than a year, would yield "positive results" for the people of both countries.
Japan and North Korea are set to resume high-level talks over Pyongyang's nuclear and missile programs, as well as the fate of Japanese abducted in the 1970s and 1980s to help train spies. The talks have been suspended since December 2012, when North Korea test-launched a long-range missile.