“We want all countries in the list to be removed but we want them to be removed by showing us that they are no longer engaged in the practice that put them on the list,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill told reporters after arriving in Tokyo.

Taking Pyongyang off the terror list, long a key demand of the North, was one of a series of economic and political concessions offered to the country to disable its nuclear reactor that produces plutonium for bombs.

Japan is worried that the U.S. will take North Korea off the list despite the North’s refusal to, in Tokyo’s view, satisfactorily address the abductions of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 80s.

The envoy’s visit also comes as American experts prepare to start disabling the communist nation’s nuclear reactor.

Hill, who said earlier Friday in Seoul that the U.S. is working with North Korea to remove it from the list, said in Tokyo that the U.S. wants to see progress on the abduction issue.

“I stressed to the North Koreans we want to see progress on this issue,” said Hill, who met with his North Korean counterpart, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, in Beijing earlier this week.

“We don’t want a situation where denuclearization is achieved while some relations among states are allowed to deteriorate,” Hill said after meeting with his Japanese couterpart, Kenichiro Sasae.

Sasae said Hill assured him that the U.S. will continue to support Japan on the issue.

“I hope to work on this issue while keeping close cooperation between Japan and the U.S.,” he said.

North Korea admitted in 2002 that it kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens and later sent five of them home, saying the remaining eight were dead.

North Korea insists the matter is settled, but Japan has demanded proof of the deaths and says more of its citizens may have been taken.

The North was put on the terror list for its involvement in the 1987 bombing of a South Korean jetliner that killed all 115 people aboard.

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