tokyo: Japan yesterday expressed caution that the United States and North Korea will make progress in nuclear disarmament talks when an American envoy visits Pyongyang next month.

Japan “would like to hope that some kind of progress will be made,” Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada told reporters.

“But looking at talks with North Korea up until now, it’s not as if there have been clear improvements. So while we hope for progress, we should not have excessive expectations.”

Washington’s top envoy to North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, plans to visit the isolated communist state on December 8 as part of US President Barack Obama’s new engagement policy.

Bosworth’s aim is to bring the North back to six-party nuclear disarmament talks which it quit in April, a month before its second atomic weapons test.

The North’s leader Kim Jong-Il said last month his country is ready to return to the talks, but only if bilateral discussions with the United States are satisfactory.

The six-nation talks group the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan and began more than six years ago.

After his one-and-a-half-day trip to Pyongyang, Bosworth is expected to visit Tokyo, a Japanese Foreign Ministry official said.

Kyodo News quoted a US State Department official as saying Bosworth will then visit Beijing, Seoul and Moscow to brief officials on his meeting with their Pyongyang counterparts.

A UN General Assembly committee on Thursday slammed the North’s human rights record and cited the government’s “inhuman” abuses.

The non-binding resolution lambasted Pyongyang for its “systematic, widespread and grave violations of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”