TOKYO, June 11. /TASS/. Russia is open to building mutually beneficial relations with Japan and is ready to continue practical cooperation in energy, fisheries and culture, Russian Ambassador to Tokyo Nikolay Nozdrev said at a Russia Day reception.
"We are open to building good-neighborly, equal and mutually beneficial relations with Japan, which is one of our closest neighbors," he said, pointing out that Moscow also "aims to maintain practical cooperation in the spheres of energy and fisheries, contacts in the field of culture, including within the framework of the annual festivals of Russian culture in Japan and Japanese culture in Russia." "We will maintain the necessary basis for the progressive development of relations in the future," he added.
Earlier, in an interview with TASS, Nozdrev emphasized that Russian-Japanese relations "are under strong negative pressure from the hostile course that the government of [Japanese Prime Minister] Fumio Kishida is currently pursuing." Tokyo felt that "the cost of actually completely severing relations with one of its main neighbors" was less than "the benefits of joining the anti-Russian campaign" of the West, he said. The ambassador then explained that in order to improve relations, Tokyo must "recognize the fallacy of its current line" and abandon it "not in words, but in deeds."
Addressing the audience in the reception hall of the Russian Embassy in Tokyo, Nozhdrav pointed out that "rapid and profound changes are taking place in the international arena, they are due to the formation of a new, more just and democratic multipolar world order," and that this process is "objective and irreversible in nature."
According to him, despite the actions of the "Western political elites," which would face an "inevitable collapse," Russia "feels the support of like-minded people, both in the countries of the Global South and East, and in the countries of the West itself, where the progressive part of society understands Russia's principled position" and does not accept the lies about Russia "spread by the biased media."