S Korea, Japan reach deal to defuse row over isles

SEOUL, Apr 22 (Reuters) South Korea and Japan struck a deal today to defuse a standoff over desolate islands at the centre of a bitter territorial dispute, officials said.

By agreeing to a compromise, the two countries averted a possible high-seas showdown that had loomed as Japan planned to survey waters near the rocky islands controlled by South Korea.

Japan has agreed to call off the planned survey, South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan told reporters after two days of meeting with his Japanese counterpart Shotaro Yachi.

Yu said the two countries would open negotiations as soon as possible for a treaty defining their exclusive economic zones, whose absence prompted the latest row over the islands, called Tokto in Korean and Takeshima in Japanese.

The islands, claimed by both countries, sit in rich fishing grounds and South Korea's state gas firm says they lie above unexploited energy resources potentially worth billions of dollars.

Japan's Kyodo news agency quoted a Japanese official as saying South Korea had agreed to cancel a plan to register Korean names for underwater features near the islands at an international maritime conference in June.

Yu said Seoul had the sovereign right to register the Korean names and it would be pursued at an appropriate time.

South Korea has said Japan's plan to survey the waters amounted to an attempt to claim rights to the islands it seized in colonial times and then returned after Japan's World War Two defeat.

Seoul says the islands were among the first parts of its territory seized by Japan when it began the process of annexing and colonising the Korean peninsula a century ago.

Japan says its possession of the islands was well established before its annexation of Korea and the post-war San Francisco peace treaty it signed in 1951 did not cover them.

Earlier, North Korea, which has been harsh in its criticism of Japan's colonial history, offered to work with the South to defend the islands.

''Let the North and South work jointly to stop Japan's distortion of history and scheming to rob Tokto,'' the North's chief delegate to inter-Korea talks in Pyongyang was quoted as saying today in South Korean pool reports from the venue.

REUTERS SRS PM1759