ANKARA

In a rare move, North Korea on Thursday held out an olive branch to Japan, saying the two countries can open up “a new future together. 

Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, said in a statement that her country would be open to improving ties with Tokyo, even hinting at a possible future invitation to Pyongyang for the Japanese prime minister.

Her remarks came after Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida last week said that he felt a “strong need” to change the current relationship between the two longtime rivals.

“I think there would be no reason not to appreciate his recent speech as a positive one, if it was prompted by his real intention to boldly free himself from the past fetters and promote the DPRK-Japan relations,” said Kim, who is the vice department director of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea.

“It is the fact recognized by everyone that the relations between the two countries have deteriorated for decades since Japan has persistently raised as a precondition the abduction issue, which had already been settled, or the settlement of nuclear and missile issues which have nothing to do with the repair of the DPRK (Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea)-Japan relations,” she added.

In 2002, North Korea admitted that it had sent agents to abduct 13 Japanese people in the 1970s and 1980s, pressing them into service training its spies in Japanese language and customs.

Ever since, it has remained an emotional issue in Japan.

In her opinion, Kim said, if Tokyo makes a “political decision” to open up a new way of mending the relations through its “courteous behavior and trustworthy action on the basis of courageously breaking with anachronistic hostility and unattainable desire and recognizing each other, the two countries can open up a new future together.”

Only a politician, according to her, 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.”

“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 a 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,” she further said.

This, she added, is her “personal view” only as she is not in the position to “officially” comment on the relations between the two countries.

Japan’s former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi paid a landmark visit to Pyongyang in 2002, and met Kim’s father Kim Jong-il.

His visit led to the return of five Japanese nationals and a follow-up trip by Koizumi, but the diplomacy soon broke down, following Tokyo’s claim that Pyongyang was not coming clean about the abduction victims.