During the 70-minute talks, Mr Abe and Mr Putin spent about 35 minutes discussing the territorial issue alone with their interpreters, a senior Japanese official said, without providing details because the issue is still under negotiation. Japan hopes to use the eight-point plan as leverage to pushing forward talks over Russian-held, Japanese-claimed islands off Hokkaido. The plan features bilateral economic cooperation in eight areas such as medicine, energy cutting-edge technologies and industrialisation of the Russian Far East.