Japan and North Korea agreed Monday to decide in September whether to resume full-fledged talks on normalizing ties, the head of the Japanese delegation said.
Pyongyang compromised on how to proceed with future bilateral negotiations, agreeing with Tokyo to deal "comprehensively" with various issues such as the need for Japan to face up to its colonizing past and for North Korea to deal with Tokyo's claims that it has abducted Japanese nationals.
"It's true we failed to settle individual problems through the talks," said Hitoshi Tanaka, chief of the Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, after two days of senior working-level talks. "But we could reach a resumption of talks on normalization if these problems are on their way to being solved. And normalization would be settled once talks for that purpose are restarted."
A Japanese delegation source said there are several problems left unresolved between the two states but that those in the way of normalization talks are the abduction allegations and resolving Japan's colonial past -- the same issues that ground the last round of talks to a halt.