Japan said on Thursday that efforts were underway to arrange a five-way meeting of foreign ministers on the North Korean crisis, but US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denied it would happen this week.
The Sankei Shimbun newspaper reported that Rice would meet in Beijing on Friday with her counterparts from North Korea's neighbours China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.
Rice, who is visiting all four countries for separate talks with their top leaders after Pyongyang's nuclear bomb test last week, said she did not expect it to happen.
"I don't have any expectations" of it, Kyodo News quoted her as telling a group of Japanese journalists before she left for Seoul, where she was to hold trilateral talks with the foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea.
A Japanese government spokesman confirmed diplomatic efforts were underway to schedule a meeting soon of all five countries involved in the stalled talks on North Korea's nuclear programme.
"We are making efforts to hold it as soon as possible," Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Seiji Suzuki told a news conference.
The Sankei Shimbun, quoting unnamed diplomatic sources, earlier said the five would use the meeting to demand that North Korea completely abandon its nuclear weapons.
Top Chinese diplomat Tang Jiaxuan, who the United States says is in North Korea, was trying to persuade Pyongyang to join the meeting in Beijing, the conservative Japanese newspaper said.
China declined comment on the report.
"At present we have no information on this," a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman said when asked if Tang was in Pyongyang and if five-way talks were planned in Beijing.
US State Department spokesman Tom Casey, confirming Japanese media reports about Tang's whereabouts, said Wednesday that the Chinese official was either in Pyongyang or on his way there.
He said it would be "part of Chinese efforts to convince the North Koreans to comply with (UN) Resolution 1718, as well as the other relevant Security Council measures that are out there."
North Korea walked out of six-way talks in November last year to protest US sanctions on a Macau-based bank accused of laundering and counterfeiting money on behalf of the impoverished communist regime.
During her trip Rice is urging swift and effective compliance with the UN measures, imposed after the October 9 test.