TOKYO - Roughly eight out of 10 Japanese feel unfriendly toward Russia, according to results released Saturday of a government survey, after Tokyo tried unsuccessfully this year to settle a 70-year-old territorial dispute preventing the signing a post-war peace treaty.

In the survey conducted by the Cabinet Office from Oct. 27 to Nov. 6, a combined 76.9 percent of respondents said they feel unfriendly or somewhat so toward Russia, down 2.4 percentage points down from a survey in January.

Asked about the current status of Japan-Russia relations, 65.2 percent said "not good" or "really not good," down 5.8 percent from the poll in January.

The survey covered 3,000 people aged 18 and over, with 60.1 percent responding.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a summit in Japan earlier this month on future economic cooperation and the long-standing issue of the sovereignty over Russia-held Japan-claimed islands off Hokkaido. Abe and Putin also met in Peru in November and in Russia in May.

Despite the sustained diplomatic effort, Abe and Putin remained apart over a decades-old territorial dispute which has prevented the two countries from concluding a post-World War II peace treaty.

Regarding China, 80.5 percent said they do not have friendly feelings toward that neighbor, down 2.7 points, but topping the 80 percent line for the fifth straight time since 2012, according to the results.

Tokyo and Beijing have also remained at odds over the sovereignty of the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, an islet group controlled by Japan but claimed by China.

The poll showed the sentiment toward South Korea slightly improved as the percentage of respondents who do not feel friendly to it fell 5.6 points to 59.1 percent.

Toward the United States, 84.1 percent feel friendly, surpassing 80 percent for the sixth consecutive time since 2011 when the United States launched a large-scale disaster relief campaign, dubbed Operation Tomodachi (Friends), in the wake of the massive earthquake and tsunami which hit hard northeast Japan, according to the poll.