The North says the victims are dead, though much of Japan is convinced Megumi is alive.
They now hope Megumi may soon come home.
Megumi Yokota was kidnapped in 1977, at the age of 13, as she walked home from school.
Megumi Tomita of NSK says papers have managed to make up for advertising losses by modernising their printing plants.
Yet with long and bitter experience of North Korea's unpredictability, the Yokotas do not wish to rush the progress of fresh talks about the whereabouts of Megumi and of a dozen or more Japanese citizens snatched decades ago.
SHIGERU AND SAKIE YOKOTA keep two framed pictures of their daughter Megumi in their small Kawasaki apartment, near Tokyo.
If Mr Abe can bring home Megumi Yokota, a national totem whom North Korean frogmen seized in 1977 when she was 13 and who may or may not be alive, then he would become unassailable.
One shows the 12-year-old Megumi posing in school uniform, a shy girl teetering on the cusp of adulthood.
Instead his claim that Megumi and seven other abductees were dead, and that most of their graves had been washed away in floods, ended a promising détente and sent relations back into deep freeze.Japan has since demanded a full account of what occurred and the return of all its citizens.
Just after her thirteenth birthday, in 1977, Megumi was snatched away by North Korean agents as she walked home from school.North Korea's kidnapping of Japanese citizens, part of a plot to train them as spies and language teachers, was revealed at the first summit between the two cold-war enemies in September 2002.
The youngest, Megumi Yokota, who is among the dead but is said to have a surviving daughter born in North Korea, disappeared after badminton practice in 1977, at the age of 13.
