N. Korea asks Japan to send lower-level officials for bilateral talks.

TOKYO, Aug. 24 Kyodo

North Korea has asked Japan to send lower-level officials to bilateral talks next Wednesday in Beijing, although the two countries were originally expected to be represented by director general-level officials at their first negotiations in four years, Japanese government sources said Thursday.

Pyongyang has requested through diplomatic channels that Tokyo dispatch division chiefs to Beijing for the bilateral talks, but the Japanese government is calling on the North to send director general-level negotiators as it did so in the previous bilateral talks in August 2008, the sources said.

Japan believes the North Korea's move in seeking working-level talks indicates its reluctance to move forward in resolving the issue of past abductions of Japanese nationals by the North, an area in which Tokyo is hoping to see progress, they said.

The Japanese government has planned to send Shinsuke Sugiyama, director general of the Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, to the bilateral negotiations, and assumed that the North would be represented by Song Il Ho, its ambassador for talks to normalize diplomatic relations with Japan.

The two countries have characterized the Beijing meeting as a preliminary consultation to fix the agenda and address procedural issues ahead of full-fledged talks.

In the upcoming talks, Japan and North Korea are expected to mainly discuss the issue of what to do with the remains of thousands of Japanese who died in what is now North Korea during the upheavals before and after Japan's defeat in World War II.

Although Japan also hopes to take up the abduction issue, North Korea has indicated an unwillingness to discuss the matter, with its official media accusing Tokyo of "politicizing" what it said were suppose to be talks devoted solely to the purely humanitarian issue of retrieving the remains.

North Korea has admitted abducting more than a dozen Japanese in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it considers the issue closed after allowing five of the abducted Japanese to return home and saying the others had died.

According to Japanese government data, around 34,600 Japanese are believed to have died around the end of World War II in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula and the remains of around 21,600 of those people are said to have been buried there. Japan ruled the Korean Peninsula as a colony from 1910 to 1945.