TOKYO, Sept. 15 (UPI) -- Japan's Foreign Ministry is preparing to hold bilateral talks with North Korea this month, as hopes fade for six-nation talks to take place before November.
Tokyo has requested working-level talks with Pyongyang in Beijing on Sep.29-30, at which it hopes to obtain answers to a list of 150 questions concerning 10 missing Japanese nationals. Pyongyang has not officially confirmed the dates, the Asahi Shimbun reported Wednesday.
North Korea claims that eight of the 10 are dead, and that there is no record of the other two entering the country.
North Korea's response to news about South Korea's uranium enrichment experiment in 2000 and a plutonium-extraction test in 1982 have complicated the issues and made progress unlikely were the six-nation talks to proceed.
Last week Japan, the United States and South Korea agreed to encourage Pyongyang to attend formal talks, abandoning the idea of holding working-level talks before the formal talks.
North Korea has told visiting Chinese and British diplomats that it would prefer to wait until after the U.S. election in November to resume the talks.
