Japan wants the United States to grant amnesty to an alleged U.S. Army defector who married a Japanese woman kidnapped by North Korea.

The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said Tokyo plans to ask Washington to either grant Charles Robert Jenkins amnesty or exempt him from prosecution, adding that the government also hopes the couple's two daughters will be allowed to leave the North.

Appearing on a TV talk show Sunday, Shinjo Abe, the No. 2 official in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, said that he hoped the United States would make an exception from prosecution for Jenkins "based on the importance of Japan-U.S. relations as allies."

Jenkins, an American who married Hitomi Soga in the North after she was kidnapped from her coastal Japanese hometown in 1978, is wanted by Washington for allegedly deserting his U.S. Army post and defecting to the North in the 1960s.

Soga is among five Japanese who were kidnapped by the North decades ago and returned to Japan in 2002.