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TOKYO — A diplomatic clash between Japan and Russia over disputed islands heated up on Tuesday when Japan summoned home its ambassador to Moscow, a day after Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev angered Tokyo by visiting one of the islands.
Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara said the ambassador will come back to Tokyo to brief officials on Monday’s visit by Mr. Medvedev to one of the group of islands that was seized by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II.
Mr. Medvedev’s trip to Kunashiri, which sits at the southern end of the Russian-controlled Kurile island chain, was seen as a diplomatic snub in Tokyo, coming just weeks after Japan seemed to suffer a humiliating setback in a territorial dispute with another neighbor, China. In that standoff, Japanese prosecutors released a Chinese trawler captain who had been arrested near disputed islands after Beijing raised the pressure by detaining four Japanese businessmen and cutting off high-level talks.
On Tuesday, Mr. Maehara sought to play down the spat with Russia, saying that the ambassador, Masaharu Kono, was not being recalled in protest, but merely temporarily returning to Tokyo for discussions with his superiors.
The top government spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshito Sengoku, also said that Prime Minister Naoto Kan will go forward with a planned meeting with Mr. Medvedev on the sidelines of a summit meeting next week of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Yokohama, Japan.
“We will say what we ought to say,” Mr. Maehara told reporters, “but our intention to aim for settling the territorial dispute with Russia and conclude a bilateral peace treaty to boost our two nations’ economic ties remains unchanged.”
Mr. Kan has tried unsuccessfully to hold a formal meeting with Chinese leaders since the standoff over the trawler captain in September. The arrest sparked anti-Japanese protests in China, while Beijing’s strong response prompted Japanese leaders to reassess their nation’s growing economic dependence on China.
On Tuesday in Beijing, a Chinese spokesman rebuffed an offer by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to mediate the dispute. The Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ma Zhaoxu, also criticized the Ms. Clinton for saying the islands, known as the Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese, fall under the protection of Washington’s security pact with Tokyo.
“The dispute over the islands with Japan is a matter between China and Japan,” Mr. Ma said in a statement, and the United States should “correct its wrongful stance immediately.”
Russia also appears keen to prevent its standoff with Japan from escalating as far as the China-Japan dispute. The Kremlin said Tuesday that Mr. Medvedev still plans to attend the APEC summit in Yokohama, and a Foreign Ministry spokesman told the Interfax news service that, “we don’t see a problem” with Tokyo’s calling back of its ambassador.
The dispute over the islands has divided Japan and Russia for more than a half century, preventing the two from signing a formal peace treaty to conclude World War II. Russia refers to the disputed islands as the southern Kuriles, while Japan calls them the Northern Territories.
Mr. Medvedev is the first Russian or Soviet leader to visit the islands, and he made it clear Russia had no plans to cede the mineral and fishery-rich territory despite Japanese demands. Japan had warned Mr. Medvedev that such a visit would aggravate bilateral relations, but Russia responded coolly to complaints from Tokyo.
“How many beautiful places there are in Russia!” wrote Mr. Medvedev in his Twitter blog, under a photograph he had taken from Kunashiri, known in Russian as Kunashir.
Japanese officials have expressed bafflement at Mr. Medvedev’s decision to visit the disputed island just days before the Yokohama summit that is aimed at building regional economic ties. But the visit may have been an effort by Mr. Medvedev to shore up his nationalist credentials ahead of Russia’s 2012 presidential election.
Ellen Barry contributed reporting from Moscow.
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