Japan is reportedly planning to hold talks with North Korea this weekend to discuss allowing Japanese women who had moved to North Korea with their Korean husbands to return to their homeland.

Japan’s Sankei Shimbun quoted various government officials as saying on Wednesday that Democratic Party of Japan legislator, Hiroshi Nakai, will hold consultations with North Korean officials this weekend over the so-called “Japanese wives” issue.

The daily said that Nakai, who used to serve as chairman of the National Commission on Public Safety, is scheduled to visit Mongolia on Saturday and Sunday. The report said during his trip, Nakai is likely to meet with Song Il-ho, the North’s top negotiator on normalizing North Korea-Japan ties.

It is uncertain whether such talks on Japanese wives will be carried out smoothly as the North has continuously refused to work on addressing the issue of Japanese abductees.

Between 1959 and 1984, some 93-thousand Korean Japanese moved to North Korea under the Japanese government’s active support. Out of that group, some 18-hundred had Japanese wives.