TOKYO, Jan 22 (AFP) - North Korea is seeking additional rice aid from Japan amid international efforts to coordinate an approach to a food crisis in the hardline communist state, a Japanese ruling coalition senator said Monday. Akiko Domoto, who returned Saturday from a week-long tour of North Korea, also told a coalition meeting that North Korean officials had also offered to resume long-suspended talks with Japan on normalisation of relations. The senator from the New Party Sakigake, the smallest of the three ruling parties, met Kim Yong-Sum, a secretary of the North Korean Workers Party, during her stay in Pyongyang. Japan agreed in October to send 200,000 tonnes of rice to North Korea on top of a 300,000-tonne batch shipped between June and September. At the coalition meeting, Domoto quoted the North Korean side as saying that the rice aid had been "distributed nationwide as an expression of goodwill," according to coalition officials. The new request for rice has come as Japan, the United States and South Korea prepared to hold a meeting in Hawaii Wednesday and Thursday and discuss a coordinated approach to the crisis in the North where UN agencies say millions face starvation. A team from the International Federation of Red Cross Societies was on its way to Pyongyang to discuss launching a new appeal to the international community to help ease the crisis brought on AFP /AA1234/220904 GMT JAN 96

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