URGENT

Five visiting Japanese who were abducted decades ago by North Korea will now stay indefinitely in their homeland, a top official said Thursday.

"The five abductees will stay in Japan," said Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda. "We will strongly urge North Korea to ensure the safety of families remaining in North Korea and their early return."

The announcement comes amid demands from the abductees' families to keep the five returnees in Japan for good and bring over their children, who were left behind in North Korea.

"We consider it indispensable and urgent that all of family members be returned to Japan," Fukuda added at an evening news conference.

The issue has become an unexpected diplomatic snag in the abductees' homecoming, which was envisioned as a brief one- to two-week stay when they first arrived in Tokyo on Oct. 15.

Yuko Hamamoto applauded the government's decision to keep his sister, Fukie, and the other abductees in Japan and persuade North Korea to send the children.

"We should definitely not let them return," Yuko said. "If they are told to return, we will kidnap them back."

The five are the only known survivors of 13 Japanese whom North Korea admits abducting in the 1970s and early 80s. While both the Japanese and North Korean governments have said they are free to come and go as they wish, family members and the abductees themselves have indicated the decision of where to settle is not that simple.

Family members insist that the returnees' children are being "held hostage" by the North, and that the returnees themselves are self-censoring their true feelings for fear of retribution.

North Korea has invited the returning abductees' Japanese families to visit the North, but they have refused, saying that the abductees' children must first be allowed to visit Japan.

In joint interview with Japan's Fuji Television and the Asahi newspaper, a North Korean Foreign Ministry official said Pyongyang will allow the five Japanese to return here permanently with their children if they choose.

But the official, speaking in the North Korean capital, balked at returning the children to Japan right away, and criticized Japan for overreacting to the abduction issue. He said it was much less significant than Japan's often brutal colonial rule of Korea from 1910-1945.

Japanese and North Korean officials are to meet next week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for talks on establishing diplomatic relations between the countries, and the abduction issue is expected to be high on the Japanese agenda.

Further complicating matters were genetic test results released Thursday that confirmed another abductee's child is alive and well in North Korea. The child's mother, Megumi Yokota, was abducted in 1977, but is listed by North Korea among the eight abductees who have died.

In Tokyo, Yokota's parents reacted with excitement when they received word of the DNA tests showing they have a 15-year-old granddaughter, who goes by the name Kim Hea Kyong and lves with her father in Pyongyang.

Shigeru Yokota, the girl's grandfather, said he wants to bring Kim back to Japan.

"Since she's junior high school age, she will be interested in seeing Tokyo Disneyland. I want to take her to theme parks and Kyoto," he said, beaming.

Of the abductees, Megumi's case was particularly tragic.

Kidnapped when she was just 13 while on her way home from junior high school badminton practice, she is the youngest known abduction victim.

According to North Korea, she married a North Korean man after being taken to the communist country, but suffered from severe depression and killed herself at a mental facility in 1993. Yokota's parents strongly question the North's claim that their daughter is dead.

Earlier Thursday, abductees Yasushi Chimura and his wife, Fukie Hamamoto, visited a monument in their hometown of Obama on Thursday dedicated to Korean shipwreck victims who nearly perished off the coast in 1900.

After being rescued and nursed back to health by Obama residents, the crew of 93 sailors was returned to their homes across the Sea of Japan in what is now North Korea.

A poem inscribed on the memorial, in Korean and Japanese, reads: "The sea is like a mother that brings people together."

Also Thursday, Tokyo was considering granting permanent resident status in Japan to the American husband of the fifth returning abductee, Hitomi Soga, according to news reports.

The husband, Charles Robert Jenkins, of Rich Square, North Carolina, is one of four Americans who allegedly deserted their army posts in South Korea in the 1960s. Japanese officials say Jenkins, 62, is reluctant to leave the North for fear he will be extradited to the United States.

After hearing that Tokyo wanted the abductees to stay longer in Japan, Soga released a statement saying: "Receiving this sudden notification, I was surprised and embarrassed."