The government on Friday rejected a call by the ruling party's No. 2 man to seek a peace treaty with Russia without setting the resolution of a long-standing territorial dispute between the two countries as a precondition.

"The government's position has not changed," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hidenao Nakagawa said at a news conference. "Japan will continue to make efforts based on the policy we have pursued all along."

Japan has maintained that it cannot sign a peace treaty with Russia unless the decades-old dispute over a group of islands off Hokkaido is resolved first.

But Hiromu Nonaka, secretary general of Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori's Liberal Democratic Party, said Thursday that Japan should seek progress on the treaty without letting the territorial row get in the way.

"We should not think the two countries can never conclude a peace treaty before settling a precondition," he said in a speech in Tokyo.

Japan and Russia agreed in 1997 to resolve the territorial dispute and sign the peace treaty by the end of 2000, but negotiations have stalled. Japan hopes Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit in September will jump-start talks on the treaty. The dispute is over the islands of Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan and the Habomai islets, which were seized by Soviet troops at the end of World War II.