TOKYO — The parents of a Japanese woman abducted by North Korea in 1977 were allowed to see their North Korean-born granddaughter for the first time last week at a secret meeting in Mongolia, Japan’s Foreign Ministry said on Sunday.

The meeting in the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator, between the parents of Megumi Yokota, who disappeared in Japan on her way home from school when she was 13, and her daughter, Kim Eun-gyong, now 26, according to Japanese news media, appeared to be a good-will gesture by North Korea toward Japan.

Image Shigeru and Sakie Yokota in 2010 in Japan. Their daughter, Megumi Yokota, disappeared when she was 13. Credit Kyodo News, via Associated Press

Ms. Yokota, who died in 1994, according to North Korea, has been the subject of foreign and Japanese documentary films and also manga comics, making her perhaps the best-known of more than a dozen Japanese citizens known to have been kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s and ’80s.

The ministry said her parents, Shigeru and Sakie Yokota, 81 and 78, met Ms. Kim for several days last week, though it provided few details. Ms. Yokota’s former husband, Kim Young-nam, a South Korean who was also kidnapped by the North, might have also been present, according to Japan’s Kyodo News Agency.