TOKYO, November 22. /TASS/. Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono has refrained from calling the southern Kuril Islands the country’s "ancestral territory" as Japanese cabinet members and other officials usually do, the Kyodo news agency reported on Thursday.

According to the news agency, the Japanese top diplomat evaded answering the relevant question. "Since the next round of [high-level] talks is expected to take place soon, I would like to refrain from making statements on the issue," Kono said, as cited by Kyodo.

The next meeting between the Russian and Japanese leaders is expected to be held on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Argentina’s capital of Buenos Aires at the end of November.

Earlier in the week, the Japanese foreign minister also evaded answering a question as to whether Tokyo would take the 1993 Tokyo Declaration on Japan-Russia Relations into consideration during talks. The document particularly says that both countries are ready to hold talks on the status of all the four southern Kuril Islands.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed at their meeting in Singapore on November 14 that the two countries would speed up Russian-Japanese peace treaty talks based on the 1956 Joint Declaration, in which Moscow had expressed readiness to hand Shikotan Island and a group of small uninhabited islands of the Lesser Kuril Chain (called Habomai in Japan) over to Tokyo as a gesture of goodwill.

The Soviet Union and Japan signed the Joint Declaration on ending the war between the two countries and restoring diplomatic and consular relations in Moscow on October 19, 1956. The document’s Article 9 said that the Soviet government was ready to hand Shikotan Island and a group of small islands over to Japan, adding that Tokyo would get actual control of the islands after a peace treaty was signed. Both countries ratified the Declaration on December 8, 1956.

However, after Japan and the United States had signed the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security in 1960, the Soviet Union withdrew its obligation to hand over the islands. A Soviet government’s memorandum dated January 27, 1960, said that those islands would only be handed over to Japan if all foreign troops were pulled out of the country.