Kim Jong Un's Sister Responds to US Ally's North Korea Overtures

The powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has signaled the reclusive regime's openness to talks with a key U.S. ally, in what could be a rare opportunity to dial down months of high tension on the Korean Peninsula.

Kim Yo Jong, 36, whom some observers have tipped one day to succeed her brother, 40, said recent overtures by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan were a positive sign. However. she cautioned against Tokyo's "ulterior intention," according to a statement carried on Thursday by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

Kishida has openly sided with Washington and Seoul against Pyongyang's provocative missile tests in recent months. But he is now betting his sliding domestic approval ratings on a chance to secure information about Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea decades earlier, the U.K. Financial Times newspaper reported this week. Kishida's office did not respond to a request for comment.

North Korea admitted in 2002 to kidnapping 13 Japanese nationals in the 1960s and 1970s. Five people and their families were later returned to Japan, but Pyongyang said the others had died. Tokyo believes 17 of its citizens were taken and has been working to secure their return, dead or alive.

Kishida told the Japanese parliament last week that it was extremely important to build high-level ties with the North Korean leadership. He has previously said he wants to advance the decades-old issue, including through face-to-face talks with Kim Jong Un.

"I think our state leadership still has no idea of repairing the DPRK-Japan relations and has no interest in contact," Kim Yo Jong said, referring to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, her country's formal name. The deputy spokesperson for the Workers' Party, described the remarks as her "personal view," according to the KCNA.

A potential summit between Kishida and his North Korean counterpart would be the first such meeting in two decades. The FT said Japan is yet to inform the United States or South Korea about the sensitive plans.

By serving as a rare channel for dialogue between Kim Jong Un's regime and American-led alliances in the region, the talks could halt plummeting inter-Korea relations, a downward trend that long-time observers believe could lead to a military conflict this year.

The North Korean leadership, however, appears to have set a high bar. Kim Yo Jong did not rule out the potential to "open up a new future together with Japan"—but only if Kishida agrees to table the subject of abductees.

"Only a politician, who has sagacity and strategic insight for looking far into the future, instead of sticking to the past, and the will and executive power to make a political decision, can take an opportunity and change history," the KCNA quoted Kim Yo Jong as saying.

"If Japan drops its bad habit of unreasonably pulling up the DPRK over its legitimate right to self-defense and does not lay such a stumbling block as the already settled abduction issue in the future way for mending the bilateral relations, there will be no reason for the two countries not to become close and the day of the prime minister's Pyongyang visit might come," Kim Yo Jong said.

A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department told Newsweek: "We have been very clear about the importance of dialogue and diplomacy with the DPRK.

"The United States stands with the long-suffering relatives of Japanese abductees, and we continue to urge the DPRK to right this historic wrong and provide a full accounting of those that remain missing," the spokesperson said.

North Korea's embassy in China, through which the talks are reportedly being brokered, did not immediately respond to Newsweek's written request for comment.