Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura on Friday pledged his effort to provide part of the ministry's fiscal 2000 budget for aged Japanese who emigrated to the Dominican Republic four decades ago.

"Aside from whether the Foreign Ministry is held legally responsible (for the failed emigration plan in the late 1950s), I understand the emigrants had a hard time as a result of the project that the ministry backed," Komura was quoted as saying by Hiroshi Kawauchi, a Lower House member from the Democratic Party of Japan, who accompanied a group of emigrants to Komura's office.

"Mr. Komura said his heart aches for (the emigrants) and promised that the government will do its utmost to help them," Kawauchi said.

Kawauchi added that nonpartisan lawmakers, including himself, will continue to coordinate talks between the emigrants and the ministry.

A group of 13 representatives of the Japanese who emigrated to the Dominican Republic in the late 1950s is visiting Japan this week to demand the Foreign Ministry compensate them for their hardships, after farmland promised by the ministry turned out to be wasteland.

Between July 1956 and September 1959, 1,319 Japanese in 249 families moved to the island nation, which was touted as a "Caribbean paradise" by a Foreign Ministry affiliate.

Admitting the emigration project was a failure, the government decided to bring the migrants back to Japan in 1961, but about 50 families remained on the island because the Japanese Embassy there promised them new land.

Still now, 262 Japanese in 66 families live in the Dominican Republic, the migrants said, adding that many of them are aged over 60 and have little income.