(AFP) --- Japan
said Friday it was monitoring waters near islands disputed with China in the East China Sea
after it spotted a naval intelligence ship from the country operating in a new
area for the first time.
The ship repeatedly
moved back and forth in the area until Thursday evening before departing, never
breaching Japan 's
12-nautical-mile territorial waters, the ministry statement said.
Japanese defence
minister Gen Nakatani called the ship's moves "unusual" at a regular
press conference Friday, saying it made "repeated eastward and westward
moves in one day".
The defence
ministry will keep up monitoring of the Chinese navy and "make utmost
efforts in patrolling the sea and air surrounding Japan ", Nakatani said.
In Beijing , the Chinese government defended the
ship's operations as standard.
“The Chinese naval vessel is conducting
normal activities," spokesman Hong Lei told a regular briefing.
"It is in line
with international law," he added. "There is nothing disputable about
that.”
Relations between Japan and China hit multi-year lows after the
Japanese government in September 2012 moved to increase its formal control by
nationalising some of the islands.
But China and Japan
-- Asia 's two biggest economies, respectively
-- have taken steps to improve ties.
They issued
carefully worded statements on the dispute ahead of a summit last year in Beijing between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japan 's Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe.
The two sides
basically acknowledged they had different views on tensions emanating from the
issue but agreed on the need for keeping them under control.Diaoyus
Distrust, however,
remains high as China is
wary of moves by Abe to raise Japan 's
military profile while Tokyo frets about Beijing 's increasing
regional and global assertiveness.
The latest move
marked the first time a Chinese naval ship operated in the area between the
disputed islands and the populated southern Japanese island of Miyako ,
a defence ministry spokeswoman earlier told AFP.
Nakatani himself
declined to comment on the ship's aims but stressed that the Chinese military
"is rapidly boosting their activities at sea and in the air".
The 6,000-tonne
vessel is armed with one 37 millimetre and two dual 14.5 millimetre cannons,
the ministry said, citing IHS consultancy group's Jane's Fighting Ships site.
The mass
circulation Yomiuri Shimbun daily reported that Japan will strengthen border
security as a result of the spotting.
Anonymous sources
from the ministry told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper the Chinese ship may have
been there on an intelligence mission ahead of a planned drill this month by Japan 's naval
forces.
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