With Seoul-Tokyo relations at their lowest ebb for years, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is as unpopular with South Koreans as North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, a new survey said Wednesday.

Following Abe's visit to a controversial war shrine in December, his already low favorability rating in South Korea declined to 1.0 on a 10-point scale, according to the poll carried out by the Asan Institute think-tank in Seoul said.

North and South Korea will hold rare high-level government talks on Wednesday, the South's Unification Ministry announced, ahead of a planned reunion of family members divided by the Korean War.

The meeting involving senior officials from the South's Defence Ministry, Unification Ministry and Presidential Office will take place at the border truce village of Panmunjom, unification ministry spokesman Kim Eui-Do told reporters.

Tensions tightened on the Korean peninsula Monday, as North Korea canceled a U.S. envoy's visit over a jailed Korean American, and Seoul and Washington set dates for military drills denounced by Pyongyang.

Frictions with Pyongyang will dominate the agenda when U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry makes a brief visit to Seoul later this week as part of an Asia tour.

North Korea has moved imprisoned U.S. citizen Kenneth Bae from hospital and back to a labor camp, a U.S. official said Friday, which could further complicate efforts to win his release.

In an interview on Friday with a pro-Pyongyang newspaper in Japan, the Chosun Sinbo, Bae confirmed he had been transferred back to the "special correctional facility" in Pyongyang on January 20.

North Korea has almost completed enlargement of its main satellite launch pad, allowing the launch of rockets up to 50 meters in length as early as next month, a U.S. think-tank said Friday.

The closely-followed 38 North website of the Johns Hopkins University's U.S.-Korea Institute said recent satellite imagery showed gantry modifications at the Sohae launch site in northwest North Korea were almost finished.

South Korean President Park Geun-Hye on Friday warned North Korea not to renege on its agreement to host a reunion for families divided by the Korean War.

Park's comments came a day after Pyongyang said it would have to reconsider its commitment to the reunion event, citing South Korean-U.S. military exercises and "slanderous" articles in the South Korean media.

Barely a day after the two Koreas agreed to resume reunions for divided families, North Korea threatened Thursday to renege on the deal unless the South scraps looming military drills with the United States.

"It's outrageous that (South Korea) is pushing ahead with aggressive war maneuvering at a time when both sides reached a crucial agreement to realize national reconciliation and cooperation," the North's top military body, the National Defense Commission (NDC), said.

North and South Korea held talks Wednesday on resuming reunions for families separated by the Korean War -- an emotive issue that Pyongyang has been accused of exploiting as a bargaining chip.

The meeting at the border truce village of Panmunjom -- where the armistice ending the 1950-53 conflict was signed -- aimed to set a date for what would be the first such reunion event since 2010.

Myanmar has detained several journalists after they published allegations of a military facility producing chemical weapons, according to their newspaper editor, as a media watchdog raised fears over press freedom.

Five journalists including the chief executive of the Unity Weekly News were arrested on Friday and Saturday, according to colleagues, who said they are facing charges over a report in January.

 North Korea on Tuesday denounced Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as an "Asian Hitler" intent on amassing military power under the guise of ensuring regional stability.

The attack in an editorial carried by the North's official KCNA news agency followed commentary by the ruling party's newspaper Rodong Sinmun last month that described Abe as a "militarist maniac" for trying to amend Tokyo's pacifist constitution.