The city of Ishigaki in Okinawa Prefecture said Thursday its mayor plans to propose changing the name of a group of islands over which it has administrative authority to officially include "Senkaku."

Mayor Yoshitaka Nakayama is pushing for the name change of the Japanese-controlled islets in the East China Sea. The islands are currently known as "Tonoshiro, Ishigaki City," and the plan is to explicitly refer to them as "Senkaku, Ishigaki City."

The uninhabited islets, known as Senkaku in Japan and called Diaoyu by Beijing, are at the center of a territorial dispute between Japan and China.