The three were freed after admitting to violating Chinese
law but a fourth, identified as Sadamu Takahashi, remained under house arrest
and was being investigated for illegally videotaping military targets, China's
official Xinhua News Agency reported.
Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said the government would
work to win Takahashi's release "as soon as possible." The four were
detained outside the northern city of Shijiazhuang on Sept. 21 amid a bitter
territorial row between the countries triggered by a Sept. 7 collision between
a Chinese fishing trawler and two Japanese patrol boats near disputed islands
in the East China Sea.
Japan released the fishing boat captain over the weekend and
said China needs to resolve the case of the four as the first step toward
repairing ties.
China's Foreign Ministry has denied any link between the
detentions and the islands incident.
The arrests have been widely interpreted as part of a series
of retaliatory moves aimed at pressuring Japan into acceding to Beijing's
demands over the islands issue.
Beijing had suspended provincial and ministerial-level
contacts with Japan, along with talks on mutual development of gas-and-oil
deposits in the East China Sea. China also reportedly suspended exports of rare
earth minerals crucial to Japan's high-tech sector and stepped-up customs
inspections, slowing trade between Japan and its biggest export market.
Speaking to lawmakers, Kan called China's response to the
incident "extremely problematic," and reasserted Japan's claims to
the disputed islands, known as Diaoyutai or Diaoyudao in Chinese and Senkaku in
Japanese.
Japan "needs to make clear its stance that the Senkaku
Islands are an integral part of Japanese territory," Kan said at a
parliamentary session convened specifically to discuss the collision case.
Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hidenobu Sobashima said
Tokyo was seeking more information from China about the latest developments and
said both sides should exercise restraint.
"We will address this issue calmly and we hope that the
Chinese side would also address this issue with calm," Sobashima said.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu offered no
additional details, saying only that the case remained under investigation.
"The relevant authorities will handle it according to
the law," Jiang told a regular news conference.
The four detained are employees of Fujita Corp., a
Tokyo-based construction and urban redevelopment company, which has said the
men were in China working to prepare a bid for a project to dispose of chemical
weapons abandoned in China by the Japanese military at the end of World War II.
The company has identified the other three as Yoshiro
Sasaki, 44, Hiroshi Hashimoto, 39, and Junichi Iguchi, 59.
The latest confrontation plunged relations between the sides
to their lowest level since the 2001-2006 term of former Prime Minister
Junichiro Koizumi, whose repeated visits to a war shrine in Japan enraged China
and sparked a wave of violent anti-Japanese protests across the country.
The spat — and China's unusually strong response — also
raised questions about cooperation between the Asian powers at international
meetings. Kan and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao essentially ignored each other at
a recent gathering at the United Nations and have no plans to meet at a major
Asia-Europe forum in Belgium this weekend.
Despite that, both sides now appeared to be moving to
contain the fallout, with China's communist leaders not wishing to further
stoke public anger that risks morphing into a genuine protest movement, said
David Zweig, director of the Center on China's Transnational Relations at Hong
Kong University of Science and Technology.
"China never really wanted to see it get out of hand.
It doesn't like to see foreign policy go to the street," he said.
Beijing is also seen as not wishing to poison relations with
Kan's new government, which took office less than four months ago, or
strengthen the hand of hard-liners in Tokyo who cast China as a looming threat
to their island nation.
"Neither of the governments would like to see the
situation spin out of control so they handled the incident with restraint, but
their fundamental stances will not change," said Liang Yunxiang of Peking
University's School of International Studies.
