Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori suggested Thursday that he would welcome a meeting with North Korea's top delegate at next month's U.N. Millennium Summit in New York, but added no decision on the matter has been made.
"I believe it is good for leaders' ideas to be conveyed to the other side directly as much as possible," Mori told reporters at a New Delhi hotel. "But at the moment, nothing has been decided," he said.
North Korea is expected to send its second-ranking leader, Kim Yong Nam, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, to New York for the summit, according to news reports in South Korea.
On domestic issues, Mori said he will instruct his government to draw up a new set of rules for ministers and vice ministers who will head the new ministries and agencies to be created by administrative reforms in January.