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TOKYO: Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on Thursday called for a strong alliance with Japan and sought diplomacy on a bitter rift over whaling.
Rudd met with Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda at the end of a five-day visit to Japan which was his first since taking office in December.
The two leaders called for collaboration in a variety of areas, including on addressing a global crisis of rising food prices and coping with record oil costs.
"Australia and Japan have a comprehensive, strategic security and economic partnership," Rudd told a joint news conference.
"Our partnership is not just based on common interests. It is also based on common values and enduring friendship," he said.
"We are both democracies, we are both open economies, we are both strong allies of the United States."
Australia's conservative opposition had criticised Rudd, and Japanese officials were privately livid, when the premier visited Beijing, but not Tokyo, on his first major international tour as leader.
Rudd, a former diplomat who is fluent in Mandarin, has countered that his left-leaning government has dispatched numerous senior ministers to Tokyo.
But he stood firm on his opposition to Japan's whaling expeditions, which kill hundreds of the ocean giants each year in the Antarctic Ocean despite protests from Australia and New Zealand.
Rudd and Fukuda agreed to disagree on whaling, which Japan argues is part of its culture.
"We agreed to engage in cool-headed discussions so that differences in our positions on this issue will not undermine good bilateral relations," Fukuda said.
Rudd said that he and Fukuda "agreed that you can have disagreement between friends".
"We've also agreed that this disagreement would not undermine in any ways the strong and positive nature of our bilateral relationship," Rudd said.
"And we will be working in the period ahead diplomatically in search of a solution on this question," he said.
Rudd's left-leaning government ramped up pressure on Japan by dispatching a customs vessel to monitor the hunt for possible international legal action – an option which the premier said during his trip was still on the table.
Japan hunts whales using a loophole in a 1986 global moratorium on commercial hunting that allows "lethal research" on the animals.
Japan also welcomed a proposal by Rudd to set up an international commission to push forward efforts at stopping nuclear proliferation.
Rudd had started his five-day tour of Japan in Hiroshima, the site of the world's first atomic attack in 1945, after which he proposed setting up the commission to be co-chaired by Australia and Japan.
"We should learn from Hiroshima and act together globally on the question of nuclear non-proliferation and a future nuclear-weapons free world," Rudd said.
Rudd said the commission would lay the groundwork for the next review conference of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 2010.
The last conference on the NPT ended in disarray in 2005.
The NPT took effect in 1970, but since then India, Pakistan and North Korea have conducted nuclear tests. Iran has recently defied UN sanctions seeking a halt of its uranium enrichment, which Western nations said is aimed at building an atom bomb.
- AFP/so
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