Japanese minister seeks more defence cooperation with Australia

Japanese Defence Minister Fumio Kyuma met Australian Defence Minister Ian McLachlan in Sydney on Thursday and proposed increased bilateral defence cooperation, the Japanese news agency Kyodo reported, quoting Japanese officials.

The proposal includes more exchanges between top Japanese defence officials and their Australian counterparts as well as mutual acceptance of defence academy students, they said.

Kyuma also briefed McLachlan on new Japan-US defence cooperation guidelines and related work in Japan on drafting legislation to implement the guidelines, they said.

Kyuma arrived in Sydney on Thursday morning on the first leg of his five-day, two-nation trip.

He later flew to Adelaide .

He is to meet Foreign Minister Alexander Downer on Thursday afternoon.

He is scheduled to visit the Staling naval base in Perth on Friday and leave for Vietnam on Saturday via Malaysia, the agency said.

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.