Map of
Kuril Island chain defining pre- and post-WWII boundaries.
When Shinzo Abe meets Vladimir Putin this month in
Tokyo, one item on the agenda is the Kuril islands and who owns them.
Japan and Russia haven’t signed a treaty to formally end World War II
because of a territorial dispute over the Kuril islands that stretch from
Hokkaido to the Kamchatka Peninsula.
The
dispute will be on the agenda when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe meets President
Vladimir Putin in Japan on December 15 and yes, it’s complicated. Odds are
that Mr. Abe will walk away from the meeting very disappointed.
First
complication, when is a Kuril Island not a Kuril Island? When the Japanese
government so decrees. On this basis Japan insists Moscow must return some of
the Kuril islands the Soviet Union seized back in 1945 at the war’s end.
It gets
more complicated. Article 2(c) of the 1951 San Francisco peace treaty between
the Allied powers and Japan states unambiguously that Japan gives up “all
right, title and claim to the Kurile Islands.”
(Note that the island chain is sometimes spelled with an “e” and is typically
defined as the Northern and Southern Kurils.)
In
October 1951, the head of the Treaties Bureau in Japan’s Foreign Ministry
(MOFA), Kumao Nishimura, was questioned in a Diet committee whether that
wording meant Japan had given up its right to Etorofu and Kunashiri, the two
main southern Kuril islands which traditionally had been Japanese and which are
now in dispute.
He
answered that Japan under the treaty had indeed given up its right to both the
Northern and Southern Kurils. (Today, MOFA insists this was a mistake.) Japan’s
prime minister at the time, Shigeru Yoshida, admits in his 1962 memoirs how
reluctant he was at San Francisco to sign away the islands.
So how
can Japan today claim that it never gave up the southern Kuril islands of
Etorofu and Kunashiri, not to mention the smaller islands of Shikotan and the
Habomais known as the ‘Lesser Kurils’ in Russian?
Easy. It
just declares that all those islands were never part of the Kurils; that they
are Japan’s ‘Northern Territories’ and that unless Moscow returns them there
can be no peace treaty between Japan and Russia.
To back
up its claim it points to a very slim reed – the wording in an 1875 treaty with
Czarist Russia where all the islands to the north of Etorofu (what would
normally be called the Northern Kurils) were described as “the Kurils.”
In fact,
Tokyo has much stronger arguments to back up its claim (more on those later).
Unfortunately, most have been closed off by Tokyo’s determination to say the
Northern Territories it claims are not part of the Kurils.
At the
1956 conference to decide postwar relations between Japan and the USSR, it was
agreed that when a peace treaty between the two was signed, Moscow would return
Shikotan and the Habomais.
But Tokyo
has insisted ever since that there can be no peace treaty unless Etorofu and
Kunashiri are also returned. Moscow has said nyet. And so the stalemate has
continued.
Prime
Minister Abe had hoped that good personal relations with President Putin — plus
generous promises of economic aid — would lead Moscow to some kind of
concession when the two leaders meet in Japan this month.
But Putin
has poured cold water on that idea by declaring only that he welcomes joint
Russian-Japanese development for the disputed islands. The implication – that
sovereignty of those islands will remain with Russia – was hard to miss.
To date,
Japanese moderates have hoped that at the very least Japan could gain the
return of Shikotan and the Habomais promised in 1956, plus some form of
concession over the two larger islands.
But
hardliners both in MOFA and the powerful Japanese right-wing have made it clear
that there must be a promise for an eventual return of sovereignty over all
four islands, or nothing.
There is
even doubt whether Japan will get the smaller islands returned. Moscow’s 1956
promise was conditioned on Japan not joining any anti-Moscow alliance. It would
be hard to argue that the security alliance with the USA is not just that.
As well,
the current disputes with the West over the Crimea and eastern Ukraine seem to
have triggered a resurgence of Russian nationalistic reluctance to make any
territorial concessions anywhere.
Moscow’s
move to station defensive rockets in the Kurils has made the message even
clearer. Tokyo has to learn that when it comes to questions of sovereignty
Moscow, even more than in the past, cannot and will not make any concessions.
The pity
of it all is that from the start Tokyo should have made clear its 1951
reluctance to give up the southern Kurils. It only gave up the islands under US
pressure (today the US insists it fully supports Tokyo’s position and makes no
effort to explain its earlier negative view).
Tokyo in
the past has talked of 36 documents it had sent Washington to defend its
position before San Francisco, but which were ignored. If it revived these
points it could claim that unlike other territories gained by Moscow postwar,
this gain was through an imposed treaty.
In this
manner, return of the Kurils to Japan would not create a precedent for other
postwar seized territories. That combined with Tokyo’s other arguments – that
the Allies before the war’s end had promised only to take territories Japan
prewar had gained by force; that its 1951 renunciation of the Kurils did not
say to whom they should go; and that Moscow did not join the 1951 treaty –
would add up to a reasonable negotiating position.
But Tokyo
has passed up this opportunity by insisting, mistakenly, that it never agreed
to give up what it now calls its Northern Territories.
Ironically
it is only the extreme right-wing and the communists who realize the illogic of
this position, and say Japan should claim all the Kurils. But given how Abe is
unlikely to want to belong to either grouping, the illogic will likely
continue.
Gregory
Clark is a former Australian diplomat with China and Russia experience. He now
lives in Japan and is president emeritus of Tama University, Tokyo.
