Japan is eyeing more than 1 trillion yen ($9.6 billion) worth of economic cooperation for Russia under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s eight-point economic cooperation proposal, reported Japan today on October 9, 2016.
The japan government hopes the assistance will help promote talks on a decades-old bilateral territorial row over 4 islands off Hokkaido. But Russia has shown no signs of giving up its control over the islands, called the Northern Territories in Japan and the Southern Kurils in Russia.
Tokyo is seeking to make an agreement with Moscow over the economic cooperation during a meeting between Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the prime minister’s home prefecture of Yamaguchi, western Japan, on December 15, the sources said.
Industry minister Hiroshige Seko, who is in charge of economic cooperation with Russia, may visit Russia around November for ministerial talks on the matter.
The envisioned cooperation covers 41 items chiefly concerning infrastructure construction, resources development and life quality improvement in the Russian Far East and Siberia.
Among the items are improvement of 3 Far Eastern ports—Vladivostok, Zarubino and Vostochny—as well as the 600 billion yen project to construct a petrochemical plant near Vladivostok.
Abe presented the eight-point Japanese economic cooperation plan to Putin in May 2016 in the Russian Black Sea resort city of Sochi.
For energy cooperation other than the plant building, Japan is seeking to promote joint development of oil and natural gas in Sakhalin, Siberia and the Arctic Sea area.
To read this news in Russian.
