About 15 years ago, North Korea revealed it had been kidnapping Japanese citizens from Japanese soil and spiriting them away by boat to North Korea to train North Korean spies to speak Japanese.
As part of negotiations, North Korea allowed a couple of the abductees to return to Japan – people who had disappeared from coastal towns as children were suddenly found to be alive, and on their way back to Japan as adults.
It was a huge story, as you can imagine. The parents of every missing kid for the past four or five decades now believed their child might be still alive, living in North Korea. A massive list of missing persons, particularly focused on fishing towns along the western coast of Japan, was compiled and submitted to North Korea. Tell us, North Korea, are these people alive?
North Korea confirmed a couple of other people had been abducted, but had since died. There were discrepancies in the North Korean accounts of the deaths and a lack of any real proof of death. People assumed the North Koreans were lying and the Japanese abductees must still be trapped in North Korea.
Since this revelation, the abductees issue has been the number one topic of conversation in any communication with North Korea. Being seen as sympathetic to this admittedly lost cause of an issue is an easy point-scoring win for any government official. Ask about the missing Japanese!
Anytime there was word that the U.S. was planning to meet with a North Korean official, then Japan would demand the U.S. official raise the abductee issue on Japan's behalf.
Abe raising the abductee issue with Trump is just par for the course and really of no note at all to the issues we are investigating here.