The Asian neighbours are entangled in their worst spat in years, stemming from the collision last week of a Chinese fishing trawler and two Japanese coastguard vessels near a disputed island chain in the East China Sea.

China has so far summoned Japan's ambassador five times over the incident and repeatedly demanded the boat's captain be released from Japanese custody. Tokyo says the skipper intentionally rammed the Japanese ships during a chase.

"It is an obstacle in bilateral relations at present and we hope Japan will take concrete actions to eliminate the obstacle," Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters.

"Japan should return the captain immediately to avoid further detriment to bilateral relations."

Anti-Japanese protesters are planning demonstrations at the weekend in Beijing and Shanghai, reports say, prompting Tokyo's embassy to urge nationals living or working in China to exercise caution.

"We warned Japanese nationals living in China as well as those travelling and doing business here, through emails and our website, that they should take care of their safety," an embassy press officer told AFP.

The Japanese official, who asked not to be named, said the embassy had no specific information that a demonstration would take place outside the mission on Saturday, and had received no guidance from Chinese police.

China's state-run Global Times newspaper quoted Li Nan, a member of the China Federation of Defending the Diaoyu Islands, as saying his group was considering weekend demonstrations.

A posting in a chatroom of the group's website called for a protest outside the Japanese consulate in Shanghai on Saturday -- the anniversary of Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931.

"On September 18, we have to remember history and take history as a mirror and face the future on that basis. We hope Japan will... take concrete action to stick to the path of peaceful development," Jiang said.

The uninhabited islands -- called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China -- lie in an area with rich fishing grounds that is also believed to contain oil and gas deposits, and which has been a frequent focus of regional tensions.

China, Japan and Taiwan all lay claim to the islands.

Japan's transport minister Seiji Maehara on Thursday inspected the two coastguard vessels for signs of damage and said it was clear the Chinese trawler had hit the ships, local media said.

"I realised how strong the impacts were and that a trawler, much bigger than I had expected, slammed into the ships," Maehara was quoted as saying.

Beijing has already postponed talks with Tokyo on joint energy exploration in the East China Sea and scrapped a trip to Japan by a senior lawmaker in protest, branding the skipper's arrest "illegal".

Tokyo has called the situation "extremely regrettable" and said there were no plans for the prime ministers of China and Japan, the world's number two and three economies, to meet next week on the sidelines of a UN summit in New York.

The United States has weighed in on the deepening diplomatic spat, urging the two sides to resolve the matter through dialogue.

Ties between China and Japan had steadily warmed since 2006, when they began to put behind them decades of distrust stemming largely from Japan's wartime invasion of China. They already have a deep trade and economic relationship.

But bitterness remains. State media said Thursday that a group of elderly Chinese planned to file a lawsuit against two Japanese companies, demanding an apology and compensation for alleged forced labour during World War II.

China's communist government often invokes humiliating past incursions by foreign powers to stir nationalism-tinged support at home. It reacts furiously to any apparent territorial challenge, whether on land or at sea.

Chinese protesters staged sometimes violent protests in China in 2005 and 2006 over a range of grievances with Tokyo, including the publication of school textbooks in Japan that referred to the Nanjing massacre as an "incident".

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