TOKYO - A former North Korean spy turned author was Wednesday due to meet Japanese relatives of people abducted decades ago by agents of Pyongyang's communist regime.

Kim Hyon-Hui, 48, as a North Korean intelligence officer blew up a South Korean jet in 1987, killing 115 people, but was pardoned after her capture on the grounds that she had been brainwashed by the isolated regime.

Now living in a secret location in South Korea, she has married her official bodyguard and written a book about her life as a spy, including her training in which she was taught Japanese by one of the kidnap victims.

The Japanese government has said it hopes Kim's visit will help raise public awareness about the kidnappings in the 1970s and 80s as Tokyo presses Pyongyang to disclose complete and verifiable accounts of the abductions.

Kim was expected to meet with the elderly parents of Megumi Yokota, who was 13 when she was kidnapped in 1977 on her way home from school, and whose case had become a symbol of Japan's fight against the North Korean regime.

"We can finally meet," said Sakie Yokota, the 74-year-old mother of Megumi, told reporters as she left home in northern Niigata with her husband for the meeting in central Nagano prefecture. "It's deeply emotional."

"Maybe there will be stories (about Megumi) that we have never heard about," said the father, Shigeru, 77. "Hopefully, there will be an opportunity to move the abduction issue forward, not just about Megumi."

In 2001 North Korea admitted to 13 abductions of Japanese nationals, who were forced to teach Japanese language and culture to North Korean spies.

It allowed five victims to return home but said eight more, including Megumi, had died - a claim Japan has rejected.

Japan insists North Korea is still hiding survivors and has abducted more people than it admits, in a dispute that has also proved a stumbling block in talks to end Pyongyang's nuclear weapons programme.

Kim, who arrived in Japan Tuesday on a government-chartered flight under tight security, was staying at a mountain holiday house of former prime minister Yukio Hatoyama in Karuizawa, Nagano prefecture.

Kim has said she received language training from an abducted Japanese woman, Yaeko Taguchi, before her mission to blow up the aircraft.

The former spy met with Taguchi's relatives Tuesday afternoon to tell them what she knew of Taguchi's life in North Korea.

North Korea has said Taguchi died in a traffic accident in 1986 and that her buried body was washed away by heavy rains.

After the meeting, Taguchi's son and brother told reporters they were encouraged by Kim's belief that Taguchi was still alive, although the former spy did not have any significant new information about her.