Japan and Russia at odds over islands 65 years on (Feature)

By Takehiko Kambayashi Dec 8, 2010, 3:02 GMT

Tokyo - When Toshio Koizumi heard Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visited cold and windy Kunashiri island on November 1 he quivered with indignation.

'That was the second most outrageous event in my life after the Soviet troops' seizure of the islands,' Koizumi, an 87-year-old former resident of Shikotan, another one of the four disputed Kuril Islands north-east of Japan.

Japan claims the islands, calling them the 'Northern Territories.' Soviet troops seized them in late August and early September 1945 after Japan accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration for its World War II surrender. Tokyo surrendered on August 15.

Soviet troops 'broke in after the war, planted their red flag on our island and declared the island was their territory,' Koizumi, who leads an association of former residents, recalled. 'Then, they kicked us out.'

Koizumi was among more than 17,000 Japanese who were forced to leave the Habomai islets, Shikotan and the larger islands of Kunashiri and Etorofu.

Medvedev was the first Russian or Soviet leader to visit the islands.

When Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan met Medvedev on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum summit in Yokohama in mid-November, he protested against the visit. His complaints had no impact as Moscow reiterated the president simply travelled within Russia.

'Russian rigidity and Japan's revolving-door leadership' were the primary reasons why the two sides remain far apart even 65 years after World War II, Koizumi said. 'I don't think Russia will negotiate in a serious way when Japan lacks a strong leader.'

Kan is the sixth premier in five years.

On Saturday, Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara, who took office in mid-September, inspected the islands from the air and said he wanted to resolve the issue, hoping to hold talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, probably in February.

The territorial dispute has prevented Japan and Russia from concluding a peace treaty and moving their relations forward.

Nobuo Arai, a specialist on Russo-Japanese relations at the Slavic Research Center at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, said one possible scenario would be an agreement on the handover of Shikotan and Habomai as a starting point for negotiations.

A 1956 joint declaration states Moscow is to return the two islands when a peace treaty is concluded. But the two make up only 7 per cent of the four islands' land mass.

'It would be almost unimaginable [for Russia] to return the other two, which are not mentioned in the declaration,' Arai said.

Even if all four did revert, Japan would not gain as much economic benefit as it might expect, analysts said.

'Fish stocks are is the only resources that have become evident in the area,' Arai said. While Russian media reported the existence of oil resources and natural gas in the continental shelf in the area, 'specific exploration development has never been carried out. Hence, that remains speculative.'

'Even if Russia embarks on full-fledged resources development in the area, they would need the participation of international oil majors. But such a move could trigger strong Japanese protest,' Arai said.

Former residents are eager to get all the islands back, but most of the Japanese public lacks interest in the fate of the small, faraway islands.

There is one more party which strongly demands its inclusion in negotations over the disputed islands - the indigenous Ainu people. Their participation could help resolve the issue, some experts say.

Hideaki Uemura, an expert on indigenous people's rights at Keisen University in Tokyo, said the government's recognition of the Ainu in 2008 could also make them an interested party in the island dispute.

The Ainu had once inhabited a wide range of regions, including Russia's Sakhalin island, the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Kurils, Hokkaido and the northern part the main Japanese island of Honshu.

'I believe the underlying cause of the long-stalled talks over the issue was the two countries' failure to reflect on their unreasonable demand over the territories,' Uemura said. 'The two countries have failed to recognize the rights of the Ainu, which complicates the issue further.'

An appeal from the 2008 Indigenous Peoples Summit held in Hokkaido read, 'We demand that the Japanese government must include the Ainu people as a sovereign people in negotiations concerning the return of the so-called 'Northern Territories.''

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