“We have conveyed our position that the Northern Territories are Japanese territory. We would like them to act accordingly,” Kyodo quoted Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara as telling reporters after a meeting with Tokyo’s ambassador to Moscow, who returned on Wednesday after President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to the islands.
Russia said on Tuesday that Medvedev planned more trips to islands seized by the Soviet Union from Japan at the end of World War Two, deepening a serious rift with Tokyo.
Japan said it would temporarily recall its ambassador from Moscow after Medvedev this week became the first Russian leader to visit the desolate islands, known as the Southern Kuriles in Russia and the Northern Territories in Japan.
The dispute has added to the pressure on Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who is grappling with a divided parliament and is already under fire for what critics say was his mishandling of a separate territorial dispute with China.
Maehara told reporters that the ambassador’s return home was not a retaliatory measure and said he still hoped to meet his Russian counterpart on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific summit in Japan next week.
“I want to have discussions in the context of building cooperative ties,” he said.
