Vice Foreign Minister Shunji Yanai said April 8 that Japan is willing to consider a Russian proposal to jointly develop disputed islands off Hokkaido, adding it is a difficult issue because it involves both countries' conflicting stances on sovereignty.

"The joint development involves the difficult issue of sovereignty, but we are ready to consider such development if concrete proposals are made by the Russian side," Yanai told a press conference at the Japan National Press Club.

He said that certain proposals were made by Russia but the two countries have not begun deep discussion on the issue. The proposal was first made in November 1996 at a foreign ministers' meeting in Tokyo.

The dispute over the Etorofu, Kunashiri and Shikotan islands and the Habomai group of islets off Hokkaido, which were seized by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, has prevented the two countries from signing a peace treaty.

Yanai also said he does not expect new specific economic proposals to be made by Japan when Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto meets Russian President Boris Yeltsin later this month in Japan. He said a comprehensive economic agreement had already been reached at the previous informal meeting between Hashimoto and Yeltsin in November in Krasnoyarsk in Eastern Siberia.

On Japan's relations with North Korea, Yanai said the issue of setting up bilateral liaison offices should be discussed at bilateral talks on normalizing ties. A delegation of the Liberal Democratic Party agreed with the Workers' Party of Korea to set up such offices when it visited Pyongyang earlier this month.