Part of the state budget related to North Korea has remained untouched in the last five years amid Pyongyang's refusal to implement a 2014 bilateral agreement to investigate the fate of Japanese abductees in the country, according to Foreign Ministry documents and officials.
The ministry has not used a total of ¥4.57 million from fiscal 2015 to 2019. The funds were earmarked for sending officials to the North as part of a probe into the status of the remains of Japanese who died around the end of World War II in what is now North Korea, ministry documents show.
The envisioned trips were based on the Stockholm agreement, under which Pyongyang agreed to reopen an investigation into the fate of Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as those that stayed on the Korean Peninsula after the end of the war.