Japan, China to Hold East China Sea Talks This Month

[ahsingjai]

Japan, China to Hold East China Sea Talks This Month

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...Y&refer=japan#

Oct. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Japan and China, Asia's two biggest oil consumers, will hold further talks on a dispute over ownership and development of natural gas reserves in the East China Sea this month, an official of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.

Japan and China will ``explore the idea of joint development,'' Cui Tiankai, China's director-general of the Department of Asian Affairs, said in Tokyo, where the nations held a third round of negotiations on the issue yesterday and today.

China and Japan have been discussing disputed rights to energy reserves that may include as much as 200 billion cubic meters of gas. The gas fields lie in an area between the Chinese city of Shanghai and the southern Japanese island of Okinawa that both say is within their exclusive economic zones.

Japan wants China to cease drilling that it says will siphon gas from Japanese territory.

``We proposed our idea of joint development and demanded China to halt operations and provide information on gas and oil fields,'' Kenichiro Sasae, director-general of the Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau of Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs told reporters today.

Japan's proposed joint development is to explore areas that straddle the median line that Japan claims, Sasae said. He declined to specify which fields would be included in the proposal.

``Since some fields have already started producing, we urgently need to solve the issue,'' Nobuyori Kodaira, director- general of the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy at Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, said.

The dispute has added to tensions between the countries over Japanese school history textbooks and visits by Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to Yasukuni, a Tokyo shrine to war dead that China says glorifies Japan's past militarism because convicted war criminals are among those it honors.