A Chinese Embassy official was summoned Wednesday to the Foreign Ministry to be told that Tokyo regrets that a Chinese consortium is set to begin drilling in the Chunxiao gas field in the East China Sea, where the two countries are disputing the boundary, a ministry spokesman said.
Kenichiro Sasae, head of the ministry's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, summoned Cheng Yonghua, minister at the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo, and told him it would be "regrettable" if China unilaterally pushed ahead with the drilling, ministry spokesman Yoshinori Katori told a news conference.
During the meeting with Cheng, Sasae repeated Tokyo's call for Beijing to suspend the project and disclose details about it as well as set a date for a new round of bilateral talks on the issue, Katori said.