Longtime enemies North Korea and Japan have announced they will hold talks this week aimed at eventually establishing diplomatic relations.
The talks, to be held Thursday in Beijing, would be a breakthrough for Tokyo and Pyongyang, which never have had formal relations and often are embroiled in disputes.
North Korea has never forgiven Japan for its colonization of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945, its support of the United States during the 1950-53 Korean War and the close relations that Tokyo established with South Korea after the war.
The two countries have held eight rounds of normalization talks without success.
Still, a warmer relationship could help North Korea get more Japanese food aid to ward off a possible famine. Japan provided $5.2 million in food aid last year, but has refused to pledge more.
In an unrelated development in the region, the official North Korean news media reported Saturday that a prominent South Korean religious figure who is a member of the main opposition party has defected to the North.
The state-run Korean Central News Agency said Oh Ik-Jae, the leader until 1995 of the 130-year-old Chondokyo religious group, arrived Friday in Pyongyang, but it did not say when he had defected from the South.
The spokeswoman for the main opposition National Congress for New Politics party, Park Sun-Suck, said the party has not been able to confirm the report.
