China to work towards easing seafood import ban, says Japan PM

TOKYO (Reuters) -China will revisit its ban on marine imports from Japan and work towards resuming imports following an expansion of regulatory monitoring of radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant, Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Friday.

China had banned purchases of seafood originating in Japan citing risk of radioactive contamination after Tokyo Electric Power started releasing treated water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean last year.

"We conveyed that we are ready to conduct additional monitoring on the treated water, and China said it will begin to revisit its import restrictions on Japanese marine products, and will steadily increase imports for products that meet Chinese standards," Kishida said to reporters in Tokyo on Friday.

The Chinese criteria that the Japanese products must meet are not targeted at any specific country and apply to all imports, Kishida added.

Japan has maintained that the water release is safe, noting the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has also concluded the impact it would have on people and the environment was "negligible".

China's foreign ministry said on Friday it will continue to hold talks with Japan on the handling of the radioactive water discharge.

China urges Japan to properly handle concerns, and its opposition of Japan's discharge of the contaminated water has not changed, Mao Ning, a spokesperson at the Chinese foreign ministry, said at a regular news conference.

Before the ban, China was the biggest market for Japanese seafood exports.

Japan's exports of agricultural, forestry and fishery products in the first half of 2024 fell for the first time since 2020, hit by China's ban.

Japan's position that the ban must be lifted immediately remains unchanged, foreign ministry official Hiroyuki Namazu said at a briefing following Kishida's announcement.

There was no clear date or timeline for when the restrictions may be lifted, or what steps may be taken for that to happen, he added.

Japan began pumping more than a million metric tons of treated radioactive water from the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2023, a process that will take decades to complete, triggering a diplomatic spat with China.

The water was distilled after being contaminated from contact with fuel rods at the reactor, destroyed in a 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

(Reporting by Chang-Ran Kim and Sakura Murakami in Tokyo; Editing by Jamie Freed and Lincoln Feast.)