Foreign ministers from Japan and China discussed ways to achieve further progress in North Korea's nuclear disarmament but remained far apart in settling a territorial dispute in the East China Sea, an official said Wednesday.
Japan's Taro Aso and China's Yang Jiechi also discussed food safety, the environment and efforts by Taiwanese "President" Chen Shui-bian to push toward formal independence, Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mitsuo Sakaba said.
The two foreign ministers are in Manila to attend the ASEAN Regional Forum, Asia's largest security conference.
Both China and Japan are participants in six-nation talks aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear program. But American negotiator Christopher Hill's visit to North Korea in June opened a separate direct channel between Pyongyang and Washington, complicating the roles of other participants in the negotiations.
Still, China and Japan will continue to make important contributions to the six-party process as it moves into a new stage following last month's shutdown of North Korea's Yongbyon reactor, Sakaba said.
Japan strongly appreciates China's role in promoting de-nuclearization of the Korean peninsula, he said.
Sakaba said Chinese and Japanese officials would step up their efforts to break a long-standing impasse over the development of gas reserves in disputed areas between eastern China and Japan's southern island chain of Okinawa ahead of an autumn target date for a breakthrough.
But Sakaba cautioned that "there … remain differences of views on this."
He said Aso told Yang that Japan opposes Chen's bid for Taiwan to enter the United Nations under its own name, widely regarded on the island of 23 million people as part of an attempt to push forward the idea of Taiwanese independence.
"Japan does not support this," Sakaba said.
He said Chinese and Japanese leaders would meet in Sydney, Australia, later this year, but that there was still no final decision on plans for a visit by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Beijing by the end of 2007, and a reciprocal visit by President Hu Jintao to Tokyo in the spring of 2008.
Relations between the two countries have long been complicated by unresolved enmity stemming from Japanese actions during World War II, despite increasingly important trade and economic ties.
