Tension: a Japanese coast guard vessel shadowing a Chinese surveillance ship last year near the disputed islands known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China. Photo: AP

Tokyo: Islands at the centre of a row between Tokyo and Beijing are covered by the US-Japan defence alliance, Barack Obama told a newspaper ahead of his arrival in Tokyo.

Mr Obama, on a tour of Asia that will also take in South Korea, the Philippines and Malaysia, is the first sitting US president to explicitly affirm that hostile action against the island chain would spark an American reaction.

"The policy of the United States is clear - the Senkaku Islands are administered by Japan and therefore fall within the scope of Article 5 of the US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security," Mr Obama said in a written interview with Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.

"We oppose any unilateral attempts to undermine Japan's administration of these islands," he said.

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Several senior US figures, including former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel, have made similar statements, which Tokyo covets as a way to warn China away from territories it claims as the Diaoyu islands.

Mr Obama's week-long tour of Asia is being dubbed a "rebalancing" eastward of US foreign policy by the White House.

Although China is not on his itinerary, its presence will be felt on every leg at a time of complex regional disputes and questions about US strategy.

On Wednesday, China's state-run Xinhua news agency published a comment piece criticising US policy in the region as "a carefully calculated scheme to cage the rapidly developing Asian giant".

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Disputed islands part of US-Japan alliance: Obama