The team, headed by Mitoji Yabunaka, chief of the Japanese foreign ministry's Asian and Oceanian affairs, will hold a trilateral meeting Tuesday with South Korea and the United States ahead of the official talks starting Wednesday.

Mitoji vowed the abduction issue would be on the agenda of the three-day talks.

"I will firmly state Japan's position at the six-nation forum that all the issues -- nuclear arms, missiles and the abduction -- must be resolved," he told reporters as he left Tokyo with a 10-strong team.

Tokyo has reaffirmed that any economic aid from Tokyo to the cash-strapped Stalinist state will only be forthcoming once Pyongyang gives up its nuclear arms ambitions, abandons missiles and is sincere about the abduction issue.

North Korea, which is seeking US guarantees for the survival of its regime, has denounced Japan's plan to bring up the kidnapping case as a "foul purpose to create a complication in the way of the talks."

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il admitted nearly a year ago that his secretive state had kidnapped a dozen young Japanese to use them for training spies to infiltrate the South.

But Pyongyang's admission that many of the abductees had since died provoked an unexpectedly strong public backlash.

Five survivors among the kidnap victims have been allowed to return home but there are growing calls in Japan that their families left behind in the North should also be sent here.

WAR.WIRE