Japanese vice foreign minister will visit South Korea next week to mend bilateral relationship, which was further strained due to a recent row over sovereignty of controversial islets, Kyodo News said on Thursday.

During his two-day visit, Yasuhisa Shiozaki is expected to meet South Korean Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Ban Ki-Moon and discuss the issue of a set of South Korea-controlled islets in the Sea of Japan, which is also claimed by Japan.

The set of islets in question is known as Takeshima in Japan and Dokdo in South Korea. Last week, South Korea dispatched gunboats to the disputed area after Japan announced it would conduct a maritime survey around the mostly uninhabited islets.

The two reached a last-minute compromise to resolve the standoff on Saturday, with Japan agreeing to cancel the survey as long South Korea delays plans to rename seafloor topography near the islets.

Tokyo and Seoul agreed to resume talks as early as in May on demarcating their exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the waters near the islets. Such talks have been suspended since 2000.

Besides disputes on the islets, the two nations are also at odds over Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated visits to the war-linked Yasukuni Shrine, where 14 top war criminals are honored along with over 2 million war dead. Seoul also held that several versions of Japan's history textbooks whitewashed Japan's wartime atrocities.

(Xinhua News Agency April 28, 2006)