SHIGERU AND SAKIE YOKOTA keep two framed pictures of their daughter Megumi in their small Kawasaki apartment, near Tokyo. One shows the 12-year-old Megumi posing in school uniform, a shy girl teetering on the cusp of adulthood. Beside it is a composite of the woman she may have become. The Yokotas have no way of knowing if the picture is accurate. Just after her thirteenth birthday, in 1977, Megumi was snatched away by North Korean agents as she walked home from school. North Korea’s kidnapping of Japanese citizens, part of a plot to train them as spies and language teachers, was revealed at the first summit between the two cold-war enemies in September 2002. Then-leader Kim Jong Il hoped that the admission, as well as the release of five Japanese abductees, would pave the way for diplomatic normalisation and trade. Instead his claim that Megumi and seven other abductees were dead, and that most of their graves had been washed away in floods, ended a promising détente and sent relations back into deep freeze.

Japan has since demanded a full account of what occurred and the return of all its citizens. Suggestions that North Korea snatched and possibly murdered over 100 Japanese at the height of the cold war are widely circulated (Japan’s government has identified 17 abductees). Now, in the first real signs of progress in over a decade, the two sides have brokered a deal. After meetings in Sweden this week, on May 29th North Korea agreed to set up a special commission to reinvestigate the abductions in return for a pledge by Japan to loosen probably the toughest sanctions in the world against the regime of Kim Jong Un, the current leader.

The news is a political victory of sorts for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who first rose to prominence in Japan by championing the cause of the abductees’ families. That background—and what Andrei Lankov, a veteran Pyongyang watcher, calls Mr Abe’s iron-clad nationalist credentials—mean he has a better chance than anyone of solving the long-running issue. “Nobody is going to accuse the prime minister of being soft and selling out,” he says.

Mr Abe was known to be looking for a way out of the diplomatic impasse. After he returned to power in 2012, Mr Abe frontloaded the abduction issue in talks with North Korea—a tacit admission that a decade of bundling it with Japan’s other concerns, notably the North’s nuclear programme, had failed to produce results, says Narushige Michishita, a security analyst at Japan’s National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.

Last year Mr Abe broke the united diplomatic front with America and South Korea over North Korea by secretly sending his advisor, Isao Iijima, to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. The uncompromising stance of the Japanese government on the abduction issue had essentially locked Mr Abe’s government out of the debate over what happens to North Korea, says Mr Lankov. “They want contacts, they want some influence and they want their say on the future of North-East Asia.”

Yet there are risks for Mr Abe too. North Korea’s about-turn is chiefly aimed at weaning more aid and trade from Japan. It could also be trying to create tensions between America and Japan, says Robert Dujarric, director of the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies at Temple University, in America. And, as the North’s relations with China and South Korea are currently strained, it may be casting about for ways to divide and rule—hence the overture to Japan. Mr Abe must weigh the diplomatic and financial costs with the very real possibility that not a single abductee will return home. Mr Lankov believes Pyongyang has compelling reasons not to free them, even if they are alive: “It would mean a public washing of some very dirty linen, including years of espionage,” he says.

Japan seems to have already made its decision. Japan is reportedly mulling ending an eight-year entry ban on the Mangyongbong92 ferry, which sails between Niigata and the east coast port of Wonsan in North Korea. Humanitarian aid is likely to follow, along with some relaxation on the movement of people, says Mr Michishita. If the experiment works out, Japan could lend technical assistance to help revive the North’s rusting economy. If it fails, the two sides will be back to square one. “We have to test the true intentions of North Korea and find out if they are serious about reform,” he says. “Otherwise we don’t go anywhere.”

(Picture credit: AFP)