Moscow, Tokyo make extraordinary progress in bilateral ties - Japanese minister

TOKYO, June 9. /TASS/. In the past year, Russia and Japan have managed to achieve extraordinary success in their bilateral relations, Japanese economics minister Hiroshige Seko said on Friday. "We have signed about 80 agreements in December, which at that moment were at the stage of memorandums. As of this April, we started to transform them into contracts or action plans. There is still room for improvement, but speaking about this year’s progress, it stands at a level so high that we could not even think of in the past," the minister said at a formal reception in the Russian embassy on the occasion of the forthcoming Day of Russia. Currently, relations between the two countries develop on the basis of the eight-point plan, signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Sochi on May 6, 2016. Under the plan, the two states are to enhance cooperation in power generation, small- and medium-sized businesses, industrialization of the Far East and trade diversification. On December 15-16, 2016, the Russian president visited Japan for the first in 11 years. The peace treaty issue and the South Kuril Islands issue topped the agenda, while bilateral cooperation was also discussed. Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe adopted a joint statement saying that consultations on joint economic activities on the South Kuril Islands could become an important step on the way to a peace treaty that the two states have been negotiating since the middle of the 20th century. Read more