North Korea had harsh words for Japan Tuesday, accusing it of adopting legislation that would make it easier for Tokyo to impose economic sanctions on the communist country.

Rodong Sinmun, the North's main newspaper said in a commentary that the hostile relations between North Korea and Japan have now reached a highly volatile state.

The commentary, carried by the North's Korean Central News Agency, said that Pyongyang would be compelled to take unspecified "resolute countermeasures" against Japan.

It said if a catastrophic situation occurs, Japan should be held responsible for all related consequences.

The North's vitriolic rhetoric comes only two weeks before six-nation talks are to resume in Beijing to try to resolve 16-month-old tensions over the communist country's nuclear weapons program.

Japan and North Korea are currently in conflict over the North's admission in 2002 to kidnapping 13 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s to train communist spies.

North Korea later allowed five surviving Japanese abductees to visit their home country but refused to allow them to be joined in Japan by the husbands and children they had left behind in the North.