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Former Japanese residents of Kurile Islands make trip to visit ancestors’ graves

The trip will last one day and the party of 70 people is expected to return to Nakashibetsu on Saturday night

TOKYO, September 23. /TASS/. A chartered flight took a group of Japanese from the city of Nakashibetsu, Hokkaido prefecture, to Russia on Saturday so that they could visit their ancestors’ graves on the Kurile Islands, Japan’s Foreign Ministry said.

According to the information published earlier, the town of Yuzhno-Kurilsk on Kunashir Island was the first destination of the party. From there the plane would take them to Kurilsk on the island of Iturup.

The trip will last one day and the party of 70 people is expected to return to Nakashibetsu on Saturday night.

Under the initial plans, the trip was to take place in June but it was moved to September because of bad weather in the Southern Kurile Islands area.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reached an agreement on this trip at the talks in Moscow on April 27. At a G20 conference in July in Hamburg, the two leaders agreed the trip in September.

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