The United States and Japan have agreed to share the cost of relocating US troops from Japan to Guam, the Japanese defence chief announced, according to Japanese media.
"We agreed," Japanese public broadcaster NHK and Jiji Press quoted Fukishiro Nukaga as saying after he emerged from the US defence department on Sunday. He did not offer any details about the deal. The Pentagon declined to comment.
Nukaga had flown to Washington for talks with his US counterpart Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the dispute, which has held up the completion of plans for a major realignment of the US military presence in Japan.
The head of the Japanese Defence Agency had said late Friday that "slight differences" remain over the matter, Japanese media reported.
"But our talks have reached the stage where we have to narrow the gap and find common ground," he added.
After shaking hands with Nukaga, Rumsfeld said: "The understandings we've come to suggest to me that it will continue where there is a close and important alliance between our two countries."
"We have come to an understanding that we both feel is in the best interest to our countries," Rumsfeld said in a televised interview.
The United States has bowed to demands to relocate 8,000 Marines from Okinawa island to a base on Guam in the Pacific.
But the two countries are at odds over how to split the cost, which the United States has estimated at about 10 billion dollars.