An aide to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe returned home from a trip to North Korea on Saturday but declined to shed any light on the reason for his mysterious visit. Isao Iijima, a senior adviser to Abe, was tightlipped when confronted by reporters in Beijing on his way home. "I won't accept any interview on this issue," he told reporters, according to Japan's public broadcaster NHK. Abe said Saturday that Iijima would report back to Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, Japan's top government spokesman, on the visit.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged Friday to double the scale of Japan's crop exports to 1 trillion yen ($9.76 billion) by 2020 as a pillar of his government's economic growth strategy, with an eye on the country's entry into talks on the U.S.-led tariff-cutting pact. Abe also said in a speech in Tokyo that the world's third-largest economy will aim to become a nation which allows not only Japanese companies but those abroad to put new technologies such as self-driving cars to the test exceptionally if they meet certain conditions.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Friday the government will be briefed by Isao Iijima, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's adviser currently visiting North Korea, after he returns to Japan later this week. Iijima, who arrived in Pyongyang on Tuesday, will return home as early as Saturday after meeting with senior North Korean officials, including No. 2 leader Kim Yong Nam. The two countries have no diplomatic relations in light of numerous contentious issues, most prominently the abductions by North Korea of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s.

A State Department spokeswoman on Thursday branded remarks by a Japanese mayor defending Japan's wartime system of sexual servitude as "outrageous and offensive," in the first outright criticism of the comments by a U.S. government official. Commenting on Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto's contention that the system was considered necessary before and during World War II, Jen Psaki told a press briefing, "We have seen of course those comments. Mayor Hashimoto's comments were outrageous and offensive."