Washington, Feb 17 (IANS): US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman has called on North Korea to engage in serious diplomacy, the state department said on Wednesday.

The call came in a telephone conversation with Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Takeo Mori, held Tuesday, Yonhap news agency reported, citing the department.

"The two officials reaffirmed the importance of continued US-Japan cooperation in making progress toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," it said in a press release.

"Deputy Secretary Sherman highlighted US preparedness to meet the DPRK without preconditions and called for the DPRK to engage in serious and sustained diplomacy," it added, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The call came as the latest of high-level conversations between the US and its allies following the North's recent series of missile tests.

Pyongyang staged seven rounds of missile launches in January alone, marking the largest number of missile tests it has conducted in a month.

South Korean Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi held trilateral talks in Hawaii last week, immediately after their top nuclear envoys held three-way discussions, also in Hawaii, on ways to engage with North Korea.

Sherman had also held bilateral and trilateral telephone talks with her Japanese counterpart and South Korean counterpart, Noh Kyu-duk, after North Korea fired an intermediate-range ballistic missile on January 30, the longest-range ballistic missile the North had launched since late 2017.

The department said Sherman and her Japanese counterpart discussed the "destabilizing nature" of the North Korean missile launches.

The US and Japanese officials also highlighted the importance of trilateral cooperation between the US, Japan and South Korea in addressing the North Korea issue and other shared priorities in the Indo-Pacific region, according to the state department.

The North has maintained a self-imposed moratorium on nuclear and long-range ballistic missile testing since November 2017.

It has threatened to consider restarting "all temporarily-suspended activities" amid its prolonged stalemate in dialogue with the US.

The country has avoided denuclearization negotiations with the US since late 2019. It also remains unresponsive to recent US overtures.