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, administered by Moscow since 1945. So much so that it insists on calling what the rest of the world knows as the southern Kuriles the Northern Territories.
The added problem for Fumio Kishida’s government is that Japan is also visible – and audible – from Russia. And it will be more and more so. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced last Friday the construction of a network of military surveillance bases in the southern Kuriles. His self-confessed objective is to detect drones and other aerial intrusions from northern Japan.
For some observers, its reach goes further, in a new measure of retaliation by Vladimir Putin, for Japan’s strict alignment with NATO after its invasion of Ukraine.
In the final stages of World War II, the Soviet Union not only recovered for Moscow the southern half of the enormous island of Sakhalin – lost in 1905 – but also territories that had never been Russian. Stalin’s troops – who declared war on the Japanese Empire a few days before the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – arrived at the southernmost Kuril Islands when Hirohito had already signed the capitulation. Hence, successive Japanese governments have refused to recognize Russian sovereignty over Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotán and the island and islets of Habomai, whose combined surface area exceeds that of the Balearic Islands.
Over the past decade, Russia appeared willing to negotiate a joint administration and even the return to Japan of Shikotan and Habomai, the smallest and most eccentric. These would not compromise the Russian lock on the Sea of ??Okhotsk, which borders the rest of the Kuriles for more than a thousand kilometers. The talks between Vladimir Putin and then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seemed well on their way to closing this open wound from World War II, which has been preventing the signing of a peace treaty.
If what Putin intended was to shake up the alliance between Tokyo and Washington, he did not succeed. For some years he repressed nationalist demonstrations in Russia itself, opposed to any return. But before 2020, he allowed them again, when it had already become clear to him that Abe lacked the will or room for maneuver. Shortly after, Russia introduced a constitutional amendment prohibiting territorial transfers.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has hardened positions on both sides, although Russia is obviously the one benefiting from the status quo. Shinzo Abe even said – four months before he was murdered – that Japan should host US nuclear warheads, as some NATO countries do.
At the same time, the government of its 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 diplomacy once again explicitly referred to the southern Kurils as “occupied territory.” When the blitzkrieg desired by Putin failed, Japanese nationalists believed that the time had come to up the irredentist ante, hoping to position themselves among the creditors in the face of a dismembered or ruined Russia.
But the bloc alignment goes beyond these two actors. 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 does so, in retaliation for Japanese support for secessionism in its former colony of Formosa, today Taiwan.
Meanwhile, Japanese irredentist hopes have proven premature, if not unfounded, making any possibility of recovery more remote than ever. In fact, even during the Cold War, Moscow allowed the expelled Japanese population and their descendants to return to the Kurils for a day, to lay flowers on graves. Not anymore.
Meanwhile, the coast of one of the northern islands has been equipped with offensive ballistic systems.
Also the generous cultural exchanges, which in Japan took place in Namuro, at one end of the island of Hokkaido, have been aborted, as have Japanese investment plans. While Russia has suspended permits for Japanese boats, in waters that are extremely rich in fishing. To make matters worse, Moscow soon joined China in banning Japanese seafood, due to the discharge of radioactive water – supposedly harmless – from the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
In the underdeveloped disputed archipelago, the twenty thousand Russian inhabitants still feel abandoned and have only one daily flight and one weekly ferry to Sakhalin. But Putin seems to have reversed the critical situation of the 1990s, when many believed that the true harakiri was to remain part of Russia.
Vladimir Putin, who admits having never set foot in the Kuriles – although he sent his prime minister three or four years ago – is no longer going to let them go. His successors will no longer have to do so. Meanwhile, the unpopular Fumio Kishida – who last year visited Volodimir Zelensky in Kyiv – can continue to retaliate by sending billions of euros “for the reconstruction of Ukraine.” The truth is that Japan perhaps saw an opportunity to rebuild itself, far from maximalism, pass before its eyes. It slipped away from him, like an eel or a bullet train.
