Why were Japanese abducted by North Korea?

You can never really trust the North in this. They can deny or make claims that the abducted Japanese died in North Korea, but that will not give closure at all. I wish their families may find peace and if those poor souls are still stuck in Kim Jong-un's prison, I hope may they be freed. Moving forward though, I want to believe that Japan will take extra measures to prevent things like these from happening ever again.

North Korea, like Russia, is just one really big organized crime family.

Japan says North Korea abducted at least 17 Japanese citizens, possibly many more, during the 1970s and 1980s. Twelve remain missing.

While the number is the official one, I suspect it's only the tip of a much bigger iceberg. In fact, there are many other cases of disappearances under highly suspicious circumstances. Though short of evidence, most of them were concurring in time and place alongside the officially confirmed cases.

Biden kneeled down to listen to her and told her that as a parent who has lost two children he understands her pain. “That really cheered me up,” said Yokota, whose husband died two years ago. “I asked the president for his support so that all of us can have our loved ones back."

Oh, I see. So his approach is the same abroad as it is domestically.

Engage in spewing empty platitudes and doing hollow gestures as a means to instill a false sense of hope and appear as a "healer", rather than telling people the cold hard truth. We all know Biden is going to do absolutely nothing and these abductees are never returning to Japan. Nor is it even a relevant point in the ongoing process of de-escalating tensions in east Asia.

For the Biden administration, it's all about "feel-good" posturing, all the time. But a political career (and party?) on life-support will only remain so for so long.

A long sad history. Good on the President for making the sympathetic gesture.

Apparently many more were taken, and many also from the coasts of South Korea.

Because they could

How many of these abductions were actually witnessed by dependable witnesses? And, apparently, some were child-rearing adults when they 'disappeared'. Japan speculates that 17 missing people were spirited away by Bukhan. Bukhan says 13, of which 8 have since passed and 5 allowed to return, so 4 unaccounted for by Japan's official estimate.

"It has been estimated that 100,000 Japanese people disappear annually. However, jouhatsu may be underreported in the official numbers. In 2015, Japan's National Police Agency had registered 82,000 missing persons, and 80,000 were found by the end of the year. -- Wikipedia, "Jouhatsu"

And how many are not jouhatsu but children taken by obscene onshore criminals and sold on the world market which has been going on for a very long time? And these children and adults disappeared during a much different leadership than exists in Bukhan today and there is little that a returnee might "reveal" that would be relevant to anything current and the very real psychological element that is Stockholm Syndrome affecting several of the people who have spent most of their lives and developed their closest relationships in Bukhan culture is completely ignored and they simply do not want to return. How many people have governments (see: U.S., zionists, et alia) kidnapped off of streets?

Sometimes troublemakers use the most trivial issues to stir hatred in the shallow minded for their own pathological benefit. While 'trivial' really does not apply to 'missing' people, compared to all else that happens to people, the relevance of this 40+ year old misstep, by perps themselves probably long dead, to poison an international relationship makes the people who continue to try to sell it look like the frauds and rabid 'nationalists' who only want to foment HATRED that they truly are.