hungry Asian power hoping to woo Russian energy contracts. Before his talks with Lavrov, Machimura said 2005 would be a «historically important threshold» in Japanese-Russian ties, marking the 150th anniversary of the original establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries, and that he wanted to make it «a special year in our bilateral relations.» The two nations recently have escalated their war of words over the four islands, which lie between Japan's northernmost main island of Hokkaido and the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East. --mor 1448 Local Time 1148 GMT
