North Korea has become open to discussing the abduction issue with Japan again and the two countries agreed Monday in Beijing to carry on with governmental talks.
During the first formal negotiations in more than a year, Japan appears to have demanded North Korea reinvestigate the whereabouts of the Japanese that its spies abducted decades ago and allow all of them to return home.
North Korea, which admitted in 2002 to having abducted 13 Japanese, has repeatedly described the issue as settled after allowing five of the abductees to return to Japan and declaring the rest dead.