OBAMA, Japan -- The drama of the Japanese abducted to North Korea took a new turn Thursday with the announcement that the five who are visiting Japan will stay indefinitely and hope their families can join them.

The announcement by Japan intensified the tug-of-war between Tokyo and its communist neighbor. It threatened to add further complications to an extraordinary human tragedy which has left the abductees torn between the families they left in Japan decades ago and the families they raised in exile.

The five left children in North Korea when they revisited their native land this month and they were to have gone back within two weeks at most.

Their visit hit a snag, however, when their families in Japan began pressuring the government to keep them here for good. The families also demanded Tokyo press North Korea to let the abductees' children join them permanently in Japan.

Together, the abductees have seven children -- all in their teens or 20s -- who were left behind in North Korea.

Calling the return of all family members to Japan "indispensable and urgent," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda said the Japanese government would work to settle them here.

Ensuring safety

"The five abductees will stay in Japan," Fukuda said. "We will strongly urge North Korea to ensure the safety of families remaining in North Korea and their early return."

Fukuda said that when the two governments meet next week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for talks on establishing diplomatic relations, Japan will ask North Korea to set a date for the abductees' families to come to Japan. In the meantime, the abductees would remain here.

Family members were ecstatic.

"The dream I have hoped for over the last 24 years has finally come true," said Tamotsu Chimura, whose son Yasushi was kidnapped from his hometown of Obama in 1978.

Yuko Hamamoto, whose sister Fukie was seized with Chimura and later married him in North Korea, praised the government's decision.

"We should definitely not let them return," Hamamoto said. "If they are told to return, we will kidnap them back."

The five are the only known survivors of 13 Japanese whom North Korea acknowledges abducting in the 1970s and early 1980s. The visit to Japan followed North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's surprise admission at a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi last month that the North's agents had carried out the kidnappings.