The government has asked North Korea to allow Japanese officials to meet the doctor who wrote the medical records of a Japanese abductee whom the North lists as dead, Senior Vice Foreign Minister Ichiro Aisawa said Sunday.
Japan's delegation for talks this week on the abduction issue "will actually go to the hospital and meet the doctor who wrote (Megumi Yokota's) medical records, because the venue (of the bilateral talks) this time is not in Beijing but Pyongyang," Aisawa said on a Fuji TV talk show. "We demanded those points (of North Korea) in advance."
The working-level meeting in Pyongyang, scheduled for Tuesday through Friday, was arranged primarily to discuss North Korea's abductions of Japanese citizens, including Yokota, who was taken from Japan in 1977 at age 13.
Earlier this month, the Foreign Ministry said that North Korea gave Japan a still taken from a video of Yokota's medical records. North Korea says Yokota had been in and out of the hospital prior to her death, prompting Japan to request that the North provide evidence to prove it.
As the video still is blurred and it is difficult to read the medical records, Japan will demand that North Korea present Yokota's actual medical documents during the upcoming talks, ministry officials said.
North Korea also gave Japan materials related to Keiko Arimoto, another abductee whom the North says is dead.
Two previous rounds of bilateral meetings made no headway on the abduction issue.