China informed Japan early Tuesday that it had posted the wrong latitude on a Web site specifying an area where Beijing is banning ship traffic near a disputed gas field in the East China Sea, government officials said.</PARAGRAPH> <PARAGRAPH>The area covered by the revised latitude is now outside Japan's economic exclusive zone, Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe told reporters.</PARAGRAPH> <PARAGRAPH>The previously announced latitudes would have banned ship traffic in an area that protrudes across the median line that Japan claims demarcates the two nations' EEZs. The latest claim by China threatened to further aggravate already strained diplomatic ties between the two countries over their maritime boundaries.</PARAGRAPH> <PARAGRAPH>'We have the impression that it was a simple mistake,' Abe said at a regularly scheduled news conference in the morning. 'Because the –

side says it's a technical mistake, well, we believe that's what it was."

The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration posted a notice on its Web site that Beijing was prohibiting unauthorized ship traffic around the Pinghu gas field in the East China Sea from March 1 to Sept. 30 so that pipelines and cables could be laid on the seabed. The exclusion zone previously announced stretched into Japan's side of the median line.

The initially announced latitudes form a rough north-south corridor stretching some 200 km, starting at 27 degrees 7 minutes north latitude and 124 degrees 55 minutes east longitude. The revised latitude is 29 degrees 7 minutes north. The exclusion zone is now only 6 km long, according to Foreign Ministry officials.

Japan maintains the boundary between the two EEZs in the East China Sea should be the median line of the two countries' coastlines, while China argues the line should be the edge of the continental shelf, close to Okinawa.