Japan will seek diplomatic dialogue with China to improve bilateral relationship, a government spokesman said Monday in the wake of massive demonstrations in China over the long-standing irritant of history issues.

"It (China) is a neighboring country, so diplomacy is very important and miscommunication should not grow between us," Kyodo News quoted Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda as saying.

"We want to deal with the development through close exchange of opinions," the spokesman said.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said on the same day that the responsibility for the current situation of Sino-Japanese relations does not lie with China.

"Japan must adopt an earnest attitude and appropriate ways to deal with major principled issues concerning the feelings of the Chinese people," he said, "The Japanese have to do more things conducive to enhancing mutual trust and maintaining the relations between the two countries, rather than doing the reverse."

Demonstrations erupted in some major Chinese cities during the weekend to protest Japan's distortion of its wartime past, which was contained in revised school textbooks beautifying Japan's aggression against China and some other Asian countries last century.

Last Tuesday, Japan's Education Ministry approved the history textbooks, which are widely criticized for distorting history and whitewashing its colonial rules and wartime atrocities last century.