Top-level diplomats will meet in Washington this week to fine-tune a strategy for holding talks with North Korea and to persuade the communist country to scrap its nuclear weapons programmes.
A South Korean foreign ministry spokesman said today that US Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly is expected to meet Mitoji Yabunaka, director general of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau on Thursday.
South Korea's deputy foreign minister, Mr Lee Soo-hyuck, will also attend.
The three countries, along with China and Russia, are trying to organise a second round of talks with impoverished North Korea, possibly this month, aimed at ending the North's nuclear ambitions. The North says it wants security guarantees from Washington.
A first round of six-way talks in Beijing in August ended inconclusively.
Washington wants the North to agree to a verifiable and irreversible end to its nuclear programmes, including production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium for nuclear fuel.