TOKYO - TOKYO'S outspoken governor Shintaro Ishihara said on Tuesday that North Korea would be best taken over by China, allowing the impoverished hardline communist state to collapse peacefully.

Mr Ishihara, who often provokes controversy with hawkish remarks, said six-way talks spearheaded by the United States had made little progress in ending North Korea's nuclear weapons drive or integrating it into the world.

'I think China's integration of North Korea would be the easiest solution, even for the United States. I suspect an underlying motive along this line already exists,' he told a news conference.

'I wouldn't imagine that China would refuse the idea,' he said.

Mr Ishihara acknowledged that the idea would 'probably' meet opposition in South Korea, which maintains hope of reunification with its communist neighbour after six decades divided by the Cold War's last frontier.

Koreans historically fought Chinese influence over the peninsula. Both Seoul and Pyongyang were angered several years ago when Beijing appeared to deny that parts of northeastern China were originally a Korean kingdom.

But Mr Ishihara said that Seoul would benefit if North Korea became part of China.

'If South Korea agrees to the idea, I think that country (North Korea) would collapse naturally and it would bring back a civil society' instead of just dictatorship, he said.

Mr Ishihara was speaking at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan alongside other regional governors who launched a group to pressure North Korea over its abductions of Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s to train spies.

The governors said they would lobby the Japanese government to do more to break a deadlock in a North Korean plan to reinvestigate the kidnappings.

Mr Ishihara, 76, is an acclaimed novelist turned popular three-term governor of the world's biggest city.

China and the two Koreas have often bristled at Mr Ishihara's brash remarks, including his calls for Japan to shed its pacifist constitution and his justifications for Japan's past invasions of Asia. -- AFP