China and Japan on Friday held their first security talks here in over two years, with North Korea's missile and nuclear programs on the agenda.
"The meeting is for Tokyo and Beijing to share their basic security and defense policies and philosophies with each other," an official of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's China division in Tokyo told AFP.
"Talks will surely include issues of North Korea's missile launches and six-party talks, but the chief objective is to develop mutual understanding."
The official said Japan would also request China improve the transparency of its military budget expansion.
China and Japan have held nine security meetings since 1993, although the last one was in Tokyo in February 2004.
The meeting was agreed to by both countries' foreign ministers in May on the sidelines of an Asian forum in the Qatari capital of Doha, amid a slight easing in tensions between the perennially feuding neighbors.
China has scaled back senior official encounters with Japan primarily over Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated visits to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, which honors 14 World War II criminals among 2.5 million war dead.
The shrine is seen by China and South Korea as a symbol of Japan's militarist past.
Friday's meeting was attended by senior foreign and defence officials including Tsuneo Nishida, deputy minister at the Japanese foreign ministry, and China's vice foreign minister, Wu Dawei.
Neither side immediately revealed much information about the talks, which were scheduled to end late Friday afternoon.
"They're meeting… they will meet and they will depart," said a Japanese embassy spokesman in Beijing. The Chinese foreign ministry did not answer requests for comment.
North Korea's test-firing of ballistic missile tests on July 5 had most recently put China-Japan relations to the test, and was expected to be one of the top items on the agenda during Friday's talks.
Japan had urged fellow UN Security Council members to support a binding resolution that would impose sanctions on the North for launching the missiles.
But China, the North's most important ally and a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, strongly opposed the measure in favor of diplomatic negotiations.
A watered-down version that dropped a reference to authorize sanctions or military action was finally passed unanimously on the weekend.
China and Japan have found some stronger common ground on North Korea in consistently calling for Pyongyang to return to the stalled six-party talks, which are aimed at persuading it to give up its nuclear program.
Wu is China's chief delegate to the six-party talks, which also include the United States, Russia and the two Koreas.
North Korea has refused to return to the talks since November last year due to objections over US financial sanctions against it.
