Officials from Japan and North Korea are holding their first government-to-government talks in four years, amid hopes that the new North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, will adopt a less confrontational approach to relations between his isolated, impoverished communist state and the outside world.

The talks are being held in China, North Korea's closest ally and biggest source of aid, which has been subtly pushing for economic reforms and a more co-operative tone. They are being described as preliminary discussions to pave the way for fuller talks in the future, covering a broader agenda.

Discussions between Tokyo and Pyongyang have been frozen since August 2008 because of animosity over past frictions and disputes over the north's nuclear programme and its kidnapping of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s.

Japan is pushing to have the highly emotional issue included in the agenda for future talks, the chief Japanese government spokesman, Osamu Fujimura, said. North Korea has admitted abducting 13 Japanese nationals and using them to train spies. It pledged in the 2008 talks to reinvestigate the abductions, but has not done so.

Japan ruled the Korean peninsula as a colony before and during the second world war. Relations between Japan and North Korea remain chilly, and they do not have formal diplomatic ties.

The talks were scheduled after the two nations' Red Cross societies met in Beijing earlier this month to discuss the repatriation of the remains of Japanese soldiers, and come a day after a Japanese delegation landed in Pyongyang in a bid to bring back the remains of relatives who died in North Korea during the second world war.

During the 10-day trip, the delegation will visit the graves of Japanese who died in Korea in the closing stages of the conflict.

In another sign of a slight thaw in Japan-North Korea relations, Tokyo also issued special visas to North Korean footballers to allow them to participate in the women's under-20 World Cup in Japan. Japan has banned trade and exchanges of people with North Korea under sanctions it imposed over Pyongyang's nuclear and missile programmes, but sports and humanitarian visits are considered exceptions.