Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and U.S. President George W. Bush are expected to hold a bilateral meeting July 6 on the sidelines of the Group of Eight summit in Hokkaido, government sources said Wednesday.
Their meeting is likely to focus on the North Korean nuclear and abduction disputes as well as climate change, the sources said.
Fukuda is expected to call for cooperation between the countries in dealing with the abductions, they said.
The U.S. plans to remove North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism if Pyongyang makes a nuclear declaration Thursday.
The Fukuda-Bush meeting is to take place in Toyako, venue of the G8 summit that will bring together the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.S. and Russia.
Abduction issue
Japan will raise the issue of North Korea's abductions of Japanese nationals during the Group of Eight summit in Hokkaido in early July, Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said Wednesday.
In a related move, a group of relatives of abductees visited the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo to seek cooperation for resolving the issue ahead of the summit, calling the abductions "a basic human rights issue."
"This problem has continued for 30 years," the group told a U.S. Embassy official in a statement. "The families are in sorrow. We don't want the United States to forget such feelings."
Referring to the July 7-9 G8 summit in Hokkaido, Machimura said, "We expect that the Korean Peninsula issue, the hottest topic, will naturally be discussed, and during that discussion, nuclear missiles or abductions . . . are issues that should be talked over."