Mongolian Foreign Minister Damdin Tsogtbaatar pledged Friday to explore a way for realizing dialogue between Japan and North Korea to help resolving the issue of Japanese nationals abducted by the secluded state decades ago.

"We're going to explore a way to see if a dialogue (between Japan and North Korea) can be held effectively," Tsogtbaatar said in a meeting with Katsunobu Kato, minister in charge of the abduction issue, at the Cabinet Office in Tokyo.

Kato asked for Mongolia's cooperation in resolving the abduction issue given that Ulan Bator traditionally maintains friendly ties with Pyongyang.

"We will do our utmost to have North Korea take specific action to realize the return of abduction victims," Kato said at the meeting.

Tsogtbaatar replied, "We, like Japanese, feel heartache over (the abduction victims). We intend to take a creative approach to turn (North Korea's) nuclear and missile development and human right issues for the better."

The Japanese government officially lists 17 citizens as having been abducted by North Korean agents and suspects Pyongyang's involvement in other disappearances of Japanese nationals.

In 2014, Ulan Bator became the venue for the parents of Megumi Yokota, one of the abduction victims, to meet her daughter Kim Eun Gyong.

North Korea has claimed that Megumi, who was forcibly taken at age 13 in 1977, committed suicide in the 1990s after giving birth to a daughter. Pyongyang handed over to Japan what it claimed were the cremated remains of Megumi in 2004. But DNA tests conducted in Japan found the ashes were not hers.

In an interview with Kyodo News the same day, Tsogtbaatar said representatives of North Korea will attend an international forum to be held in June in Ulan Bator to discuss security issues in Northeast Asia.

However, he did not disclose the names of North Korean attendees.

Last year, on the sideline of the forum, Shigeki Takizaki, then-deputy director general of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, met with Ri Yong Pil, deputy head of the North Korean Foreign Ministry's Institute for American Studies and urged Pyongyang to return all abducted Japanese nationals.

Takizaki also told him that Tokyo cannot tolerate Pyongyang's nuclear and missile development.