Democratic Party of Japan leader Yukio Hatoyama said on Monday he would work to resolve a decades-old territorial feud with Russia, after his party won a landslide victory in a Japanese election.
Both countries claim sovereignty over a group of sparsely populated islands, the closest of which is just 15 km (nine miles) from Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido and which lie amid rich fishing grounds close to Russian oil and gas production regions.
