Abe meets abductees' families THERE is a dignity about Shigeru and Sakie Yokota, the parents of Megumi Yokota, who was kidnapped in 1977 by North Korean agents while on her way home from school. She was 13. Mr and Mrs Yokota are now aged 81 and 78, and time is running out for them to be reunited with their now grown-up daughter, if she is still alive. Yet with long and bitter experience of North Korea’s unpredictability, the Yokotas do not wish to rush the progress of fresh talks about the whereabouts of Megumi and of a dozen or more Japanese citizens snatched decades ago. At the start of July Japan lifted a range of sanctions on Pyongyang following the regime’s announcement of what it intended to look like a real effort to try to resolve the matter of Japanese abductees' whereabouts. Travel between the two countries will be permitted, as well as port calls by North Korean ships for humanitarian purposes. Japan stopped short of allowing a ferry to resume its old course between Wonsan, on North Korea’s east coast, and Niigata, on Japan’s west. Its diplomats are wary of breaking ranks with America and South Korea on dealing with the rogue regime. Yet for Mrs Yokota the measures went too far. “We have consistently demanded that the sanctions should be eased only after specific details [about the abductees] emerged”, she told the Asahi Shimbun, a newspaper.

Japan nonetheless elected to lift sanctions once it learned that North Korea’s inquiry may prove more thorough or sincere than previous probes. After ten years of stalemate, the main reason for such hope in Japan is that North Korea’s secret police will form part of the inquiry. Its influence has always been powerful. Last year the Ministry of State Security appears to have played a central role in the purge and execution of Jang Sung Taek, the uncle and right-hand man to Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s dictator. Until now, Pyongyang’s officials have argued that properly investigating the abductions of Japanese citizens was impossible as they had been carried out by “special organisations”. The state-security ministry will surely have the power to go where others have always feared to tread, Japanese negotiators reckon. Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, has accordingly called the Special Investigation Committee on the abductees “a structure that can make national decisions”.

Mrs Yokota is not the only one to call for restraint. This week the Japanese press reported that America’s secretary of state, John Kerry, has warned Japan’s foreign minister, Fumio Kishida, that overtures for the sake of the abductees must not undermine trilateral co-operation among Japan, the United States and South Korea in dealing with North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes. In particular, America appears unlikely to welcome a visit by Mr Abe to Pyongyang without being properly consulted.

Even so, expectations are rising in Japan that Mr Abe can pull off a notable breakthrough over the abductees. Such a coup could greatly boost his government’s popularity. A decade or so ago it was his belief in the abductees’ families and their strange tale that first brought him to political prominence. Back then, few credited that anything so weird and tragic could have happened to Megumi and to other young Japanese. North Korea is due to hand in its report on the abductees in August or later this year. There remains much to complicate the hope that the families can at last be reunited.