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Beijing (AFP) Oct 9, 2010 China on Saturday released the last of four Japanese men held in the north of the country for allegedly filming a military site, state media said, amid a weeks-long spat between the Asian neighbours. The State Security Bureau released Sadamu Takahashi on bail after ordering him to write a "statement of repentance", the official Xinhua news agency said, citing local authorities. "Sadamu Takahashi has left the place where he was residing under surveillance after going through legal procedures," the report said. The other three men -- identified by Japanese media as Yoshiro Sasaki, 44, Hiroki Hashimoto, 39, and Junichi Iguchi, 59 -- were released on September 30 after admitting to violating Chinese law, Xinhua said previously. The four men were detained last month in the northern province of Hebei amid a bitter diplomatic standoff between China and Japan, sparked by Tokyo's arrest of a Chinese trawler captain in contested waters in the East China Sea. Their employer, Tokyo-based construction company Fujita, said they had been visiting the city of Shijiazhuang to prepare a bid for a project to dispose of chemical weapons left in China by invading Japanese forces in the 1930s. An official at the Japanese embassy in Beijing told AFP that the Chinese side had not informed consular officials that Takahashi had been released and the embassy had not been in contact with him. The row between Asia's two biggest economies is the worst in years, and has undermined painstaking recent efforts to improve relations marked by decades of mistrust stemming from Japan's brutal invasion of China. Last month, Japan released the trawler captain, whose boat was in a collision with two Japanese coastguard patrol boats near an island chain in the East China Sea claimed by both countries as well as Taiwan. But the war of words continued unabated, and traders in Tokyo said Beijing went so far as to disrupt the exports to Japan of rare earth minerals, which Japanese high-tech firms rely on for making a variety of products. China repeatedly denied it had blocked shipments of the materials, used in everything from iPods to wind turbines -- a market in which it has a virtual global monopoly. Japan's new Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara, considered a China hawk, has said he hopes for an improvement in relations but also that amid the row, "people in the whole world saw a part of China's essential character". Last Saturday, China called on Japan to "maintain the full spectrum of relations" between the two nations as the damaging territorial row rumbled on. Both sides had however insisted that the case of the four detained men was unrelated to the spat over the maritime incident.
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