Russia is so big that it can be seen with the naked eye from Japan. However, Tokyo has never recognized Russian sovereignty over the islands in question, conquered by Moscow in 1945. So much so that it insists on calling what the rest of the world knows as the Southern Kurils the Northern Territories.
The added problem for Fumio Kishida’s Government is that Japan is also visible from Russia. And it will be more and more. The Russian Defense Minister, Serguei Xoigú, announced yesterday the construction of a network of military surveillance bases in the southern Kurils.
Its objective is the detection of drones and other aerial intrusions from northern Japan. For some observers, its scope goes further, in a new measure of retaliation on the part of Vladimir Putin, for the ferri alignment of Japan with NATO after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In the last stages of the Second World War, the Soviet Union not only recovered the southern half of the huge island of Sakhalin – lost in 1905 – but also territories that had never been Russian. Stalin’s troops arrived in the southernmost Kurils when Hirohito had already signed the capitulation. That is why successive Japanese governments have refused to recognize Russian sovereignty over Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan and the island and islets of Habomai, with a combined surface area greater than that of the Balearic Islands.
Over the past decade, Russia has appeared willing to negotiate a joint administration and even the return to Japan of the smaller and more eccentric Shikotan and Habomai. These would not compromise the Russian lock on the Sea of ??Okhotsk, which border the rest of the Kurils along more than a thousand kilometers. The talks between Putin and then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seemed well on their way to closing this open wound from the Second World War, which has prevented the signing of a peace treaty.
If what Putin intended was to undermine the alliance between Tokyo and Washington, he did not succeed. For several years he repressed nationalist demonstrations in Russia itself, opposed to any devolution. But before 2020, he allowed them again, when it became clear to him that Abe had no will or leeway. Shortly after, Russia introduced a constitutional amendment that prohibits territorial cessions.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has hardened the positions of both sides, despite the fact that Russia is the one benefiting from the status quo.
Abe went so far as to say that Japan should host American nuclear warheads. Together, the Government of his co-religionist, Fumio Kishida, seamlessly joined the sanctions against Russia promoted by Washington and Brussels. Also, for the first time in almost twenty years, Tokyo’s diplomacy once again explicitly referred to the southern Kurils as “occupied territory”. When Putin’s desired blitzkrieg failed, Japanese nationalists believed it was time to up the ante, hoping to position themselves among the creditors in the face of a dismembered or ruined Russia.
But block alignment goes further. Despite the many atrocities committed by the Japanese empire in China, Beijing had resisted recognizing the four southern Kuril Islands as Russian. But now it is doing so, in retaliation for Japanese support for secessionism in its former colony of Formosa, now Taiwan.
Meanwhile, Japanese redemptive hopes have been shown to be, if not unfounded, premature, far from any possibility of recovery. In fact, even during the cold war, it allowed the expelled Japanese population and their descendants to return to the Kurils for a day, to lay flowers on the graves. not anymore
