Foreign Minister Yohei Kono on Tuesday denied a report that Japan secretly paid $200 million to the United States over the 1972 reversion of Okinawa to Japanese rule, saying he has checked it directly with the official allegedly involved.

Kono told reporters that he talked with Bunroku Yoshino, then head of the American Affairs Bureau at the Foreign Ministry, after the report of secret deals appeared Monday in a Japanese newspaper.

Yoshino, whose handwritten initials reportedly exist on a related declassified U.S. document, "said there are no such documents in Japan because such secret deals do not exist," Kono said.