Pyongyang's official media Thursday doused Tokyo's hope of addressing the issue of Japanese abducted to North Korea when government officials from the two countries meet later this month for the first time in four years.
The meeting, scheduled for Aug. 29 in Beijing, is the outgrowth of talks between Japanese and North Korean Red Cross officials earlier this month in Beijing on ways to deal with the remains of Japanese who died in what is now North Korea near the 1945 end of Japan's colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.
In a commentary Thursday, North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency accused Tokyo of "politicizing" what it said was a purely humanitarian issue.