Arab News Japan

DUBAI: Japan and North Korea held a meeting in Mongolia in mid-May, according to a South Korean newspaper. However, the meeting was undisclosed.

The meeting was held as Tokyo sought to resolve Pyongyang’s past abductions of Japanese nationals. The meeting took place near Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar.

The Japanese delegation included a politician, according to Kyodo News, while North Korea’s side included three people, with one individual related to the Reconnaissance General Bureau, North Korea’s intelligence agency.

It was also reported that the two nations were set to meet last week in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, but the information has yet to be confirmed.

In early May, Japan’s Prime Minister KISHIDA Fumio said he wanted to promote “high-level bilateral negotiations” with North Korea in order to bring back the Japanese abductees.

The undisclosed meeting took place despite Kim Jong Un’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, said in March that she rejected any contact with Japan.

North Korea and the South have been in an ongoing “psychological warfare,” as Kim Jong Un sent hundreds of garbage filled balloons to its neighbor over the past few weeks.

North Korea has sent hundreds of balloons into the South, carrying trash like cigarette butts and toilet paper, in what it calls retaliation for balloons laden with anti-Pyongyang propaganda floated northwards by activists in the South, which Seoul legally cannot stop.

Kim Yo Jong said in a statement released on Monday that South Korea would “suffer a bitter embarrassment of picking up waste paper without rest and it will be its daily work.”

In the statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, she slammed the activists’ leaflets as “psychological warfare” and warned that unless Seoul stopped them and called off the loudspeaker broadcasts, the North would hit back.