Japan and New Zealand agreed Monday to continue cooperating on regional security issues, particularly through maritime surveillance of illegal ship-to-ship transfers by North Korea.
During their talks in the New Zealand capital, Foreign Minister Taro Kono, together with his New Zealand counterpart, Winston Peters, said the two countries had reaffirmed their cooperation to achieve the concrete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
New Zealand and Australia had both said in September they were deploying patrol planes to Japan to assist with efforts to monitor illegal ship-to-ship transfers of goods by North Korean vessels.