North Korea’s first session of the 15th Supreme People’s Assembly was held on March 23. In his policy speech, Kim Jong Un, newly re-elected as president of the State Affairs Commission, sharply criticized both the United States and South Korea. Japan, however, was not mentioned at all.

This omission is telling. While Washington and Seoul are framed as direct threats, Japan – lacking offensive military capabilities – does not appear to be viewed as an urgent security concern by Pyongyang.

Personnel arrangements reinforce this point. The newly established Foreign Affairs Committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly consists of nine members, including chair Kim Song Nam, director of the International Affairs Department of the Workers’ Party of Korea, and vice chair First Vice Premier Kim Tok Hun. Yet none is specifically responsible for Japanese affairs. This is consistent with the longstanding reality that only a small number of officials within North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs handle Japan-related issues.

By contrast, Japan devotes considerably greater attention to North Korea. The Northeast Asia Division of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs includes roughly 15 staff members focused on North Korean affairs. Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae has repeatedly condemned North Korean missile tests and expressed her willingness to hold a summit with Pyongyang. In this sense, the relationship has often appeared one-sided – an “unrequited love” on Japan’s part.

On the same day as Kim Jong Un’s speech, his sister Kim Yo Jong, a senior official in the Workers’ Party of Korea, issued a statement directed at Japan, her first such statement in two years. Referring to Takaichi’s stated willingness to hold a summit, she remarked, “It is not a problem to be realized just because Japan wishes or decides to do so,” and added that North Korea’s leadership has “no intention to meet or face” a Japanese prime minister seeking to resolve “unilateral agendas” that Pyongyang does not recognize.

She went further, suggesting that Japan would need to abandon what she described as “anachronistic practices and habits” before any meeting could take place. While prefacing her remarks as a “thoroughly personal position,” she concluded bluntly: “I do not want to see the spectacle of the Japanese prime minister coming to Pyongyang.”

Rather than signaling an opening, this statement should be understood as reiterating North Korea’s established position. As in its messaging toward the United States, Pyongyang continues to place the burden of change on the other side. The reference to a “personal position” allows some flexibility in tone, but the substance of the message is clear: any progress would require a shift in Japan’s policy.

This leaves the initiative with Tokyo. Whether the Takaichi administration is prepared to respond is another matter.

The central obstacle remains the abduction issue, which continues to shape Japanese public opinion. It is widely assumed that North Korea will not offer a resolution that satisfies domestic expectations in Japan, regardless of the course of negotiations. This reality imposes a severe constraint on any diplomatic initiative. The sad reality is that Japan is unlikely at this point to see the abductees return home in good health.

The issue has long been closely associated with the prime minister’s office. Since the Koizumi Junichiro administration, responsibility for North Korea policy has effectively been centralized at the top of government. As a result, the families of abductees have relied heavily on successive prime ministers, even when they have had reservations about how the issue has been handled.

Past experience is instructive. Meaningful engagement between Japan and North Korea has been limited to periods when Japanese leadership was both politically strong and relatively conservative. In 2002, Hasuike Kaoru, returned to Japan for the first time in 24 years, after which future Prime Minister Abe Shinzo won public support by exclaiming that “I am determined to resolve the abduction issue with my own hands, without missing any opportunity.” His subsequent administration came under fire for never actually confronting Kim Jong Un over the issue. Perhaps not unrelated to that, Masumoto Teruaki, the older brother of abductee Masumoto Rumiko, who has not been able to return to Japan, ran for the National Diet for an opposition party

It is worth nothing, though, that the only times North Korea has really sought to engage with Japan were during the Koizumi administration, when two summit meetings were held, and the Abe administration, when the Stockholm Agreement was finally reached to allow for a re-investigation of abductees in 2014. What those two governments had in common was that they enjoyed high approval ratings and were quite conservative. Pyongyang is well aware that without public support, especially from Japanese conservatives who tend to take a hard line on North Korea, Japan cannot negotiate with a de facto hostile country.

It is precisely because the Takaichi administration meets these two criteria that Kim Yo Jong issued a statement as a possible way forward. In fact, her statement was tantamount to reversing for the first time in two years the no-contact policy that Pyongyang had declared when Kishida Fumio was prime minister of Japan.

Even so, the obstacles remain substantial. The Takaichi administration is unlikely to risk its political standing by pursuing negotiations that offer little prospect of tangible progress. At the same time, U.S.-North Korea diplomacy shows no signs of movement.

Under these conditions, any shift in Japan-North Korea relations will be difficult to achieve. For now, the structural constraints on both sides suggest that the current stalemate is likely to persist.