BEIJING (Reuters) -&nbsp;China&nbsp;will maintain&nbsp;bans on the import of&nbsp;food&nbsp;from&nbsp;about one-fifth of&nbsp;Japanese prefectures for&nbsp;safety&nbsp;reasons, Chinese customs said on Friday,&nbsp;citing&nbsp;Japan's move to discharge nuclear contaminated water into the sea.
China, the biggest buyer of&nbsp;Japan's seafood&nbsp;exports, said it would also strictly review the documents for&nbsp;food, especially aquatic products,&nbsp;from&nbsp;other parts of&nbsp;Japan, customs said in a statement.
China&nbsp;customs said it would continuously strengthen the detection and monitoring of radioactive substances to ensure the&nbsp;safety&nbsp;of&nbsp;food&nbsp;imported&nbsp;from&nbsp;Japan&nbsp;in&nbsp;banning&nbsp;food&nbsp;from&nbsp;10 prefectures.
The move was to prevent the export of radioactive contaminated&nbsp;Japanese&nbsp;food&nbsp;to&nbsp;China&nbsp;and protect the&nbsp;food&nbsp;safety&nbsp;of Chinese consumers'&nbsp;imports,&nbsp;China&nbsp;said.
For weeks&nbsp;China&nbsp;had publicly voiced strong opposition to&nbsp;Japan's move to discharge treated radioactive water&nbsp;from&nbsp;its crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea.
The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, this week gave&nbsp;Japan&nbsp;the greenlight to begin discharging more than a million metric tons of water used to cool the plant's fuel rods after it was wrecked by a 2011 tsunami.
China&nbsp;customs said the report did not fully reflect the views of all the experts involved in the assessment process, and the conclusions were not unanimously endorsed by the experts.
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(Reporting by Ella Cao and Bernard Orr Editing by Jacqueline Wong and William Mallard)

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China maintains bans on food imports from Japan due to safety reasons