TOKYO, March 7: Japan and South Korea agreed on Sunday to work closely to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear arms ambitions, but gave only a passing attention to thorny bilateral issues.

Visiting South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon held talks with his Japanese counterpart Yoriko Kawaguchi in which they stressed that their countries should cooperate on the North Korean issue, a Japanese official said.

The discussions followed six-country talks in Beijing onth on ending North Korea's nuclear weapons programmes. "At the last round of the six-party talks, Japan, the United States and South Korea worked well in closer cooperation with one another and moved a step forward," the official quoted Kawaguchi as telling Ban.

The February talks involving the United States, North and South Korea, Japan, Russia and China ended only with an agreement to set up a working group and hold a third round of discussions in Beijing before the end of June.

But there was little evidence that those talks had narrowed the gulf between North Korea and the United States. Washington accuses North Korea of pursuing a uranium enrichment programme to make nuclear weapons.

North Korea repeated in Beijing its denial that it had a clandestine enriched uranium weapons programme in addition to the plutonium-based bomb-making project it is offering to freeze in exchange for energy aid and diplomatic concessions.

"It is important for us to continue to urge North Korea to accept the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of its nuclear weapons programmes," the Japanese official quoted Ban as telling Kawaguchi.

Ban flew to Tokyo only days after a row flared between Japan and South Korea over postage stamps showing a group of islets claimed by both states in a long-standing territorial dispute. -Reuters