Japan, Relations with

JAPAN, RELATIONS WITH

Russian-Japanese relations throughout the twentieth century were characterized by hostility, mutual suspicion, and military conflict. Foreign policy perceptions, policies, and behaviors shaped the relationship, as did personalities, issues, and disputes—most notably the dispute over the four Kuril islands, or northern territories, in Japanese parlance. Japan and the USSR emerged from World War II with radically different views of security: the former inward-looking and defensive, with constrained military capabilities; the latter outward-looking, offensive, and militaristic. The Japanese were convinced that internal law and justice dictated the return of the southern Kurils, while the Soviets asserted that territory acquired by war could not be relinquished. Post-Soviet Russia has been more amenable to discussing the territorial issue, but progress has been glacial.

Russian explorers first pushed southward from Kamchatka into the Kuril island chain, encountering Japanese settlers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The two countries eventually agreed on a border, with the 1855 Treaty of Shimoda granting Etorofu and the islands south of it to Japan. Russia's push into Manchuria and construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway late in the nineteenth century threatened Japan's growing

imperial interests in China and led to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. The 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth, brokered by U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, ended the war and gave Japan control of coal-rich Sakhalin south of the fiftieth parallel along with the adjacent islands.

Formally Russia's ally during World War I, Japan became alarmed at the Bolshevik coup in 1917 and subsequently deployed some 73,000 troops to protect its interests in the Russian Far East. Japan withdrew from Russia in 1922 but negotiated concessions for natural resources in northern Sakhalin. Tensions remained high during most of the interwar period, and there were armed clashes along the Soviet border with Japanese-occupied Manchuria between 1937 and 1939. Moscow and Tokyo negotiated a neutrality pact in April 1941. The two armies clashed only during the final days of the war, as the Red Army swept through Manchuria and occupied all of Sakhalin and the Kurils. Nearly 600,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians were captured and interned in Soviet labor camps; roughly one-third of them perished in Siberia.

Relations between Japan and the USSR during the Cold War were tense and distant. The Soviet government refused to sign the Japanese Peace Treaty at the 1951 San Francisco Conference, which in any event failed to specify ownership of Sakhalin and the Kurils. Differing interpretations over sovereignty of the islands would preclude a Russo-Japanese peace treaty well into the twenty-first century. The Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956 normalized relations and proposed the return of Shikotan and the Habomais (an idea quashed by U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles), but it failed to solve the territorial issue. Moscow objected to the U.S.-Japan security relationship, and from the 1960s through the 1980s targeted part of its substantial military force deployed in the Russian Far East toward Japan.

For much of the postwar era Russo-Japanese relations reflected the competition between the Soviet Union and the United States. For Washington, Japan was the key ally against Communist expansion in the western Pacific. The Soviet leadership in the Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev eras seems to have regarded Japan as merely an extension of the United States, and consistently blamed Japan for the poor state of Russo-Japanese relations. Stalemate on the territorial issue served American interests by maintaining confrontation between Japan and Russia, ensuring the Soviets would need to commit resources to protect their sparsely populated eastern borders.

Moscow's leadership refused to acknowledge Japan as a significant international actor in its own right, even as the country developed into an export powerhouse with the world's second largest economy. Moscow's approach to Japan must be viewed in the context of Soviet global and regional considerations, especially the Cold War competition with America and, after 1961, the deterioration of ties with Communist China. The Kremlin's foreign policy architects generally viewed Japan with disdain. They seldom relied on the considerable expertise of the USSR's Japan specialists and frequently pursued contradictory goals with regard to Japan.

Cultural distance also may explain part of the antipathy between Russia and Japan. Public opinion surveys indicate that Russia consistently ranks at the top of countries most disliked by Japanese. Russians are considerably more favorably inclined to Japan, but in many respects their two civilizations are very different. Tellingly, the collapse of the Soviet Union was not enough to provoke a sudden upsurge of pro-Russian sentiment, as it did in much of Europe and the United States.

Not until Mikhail Gorbachev's "new thinking" did Soviet foreign policy show much flexibility toward Japan. Gorbachev and his foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze were more attentive to their Asia specialists, but they ranked Japan relatively low on the list of foreign policy priorities, after ties with the United States, Europe, and China. By the time Gorbachev visited Tokyo in April 1991, his freedom to maneuver was constrained by a backlash from conservatives in Moscow that, combined with growing nationalist and regional opposition, made any progress on the territorial issue virtually impossible.

Russo-Japanese relations did not improve markedly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russian president Boris Yeltsin's 1993 meeting with Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa produced the Tokyo Declaration, in which the two sides pledged to negotiate the territorial issue on the basis of historical facts and the principles of law and justice. But the two sides interpreted these terms differently. Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto (1996–1998) tried a package approach to relations, bundling a wide range of issues including trade, energy, security, and cultural exchanges, and he came closer to reaching an accord than had any previous Japanese ese leader. But the flurry of informal summits and intensified diplomatic activity in the late 1990s failed either to deliver a peace treaty or to enhance economic cooperation.

Prospects for trade and investment improved early in the twenty-first century as Tokyo urged Moscow to approve a Siberian oil pipeline to the eastern coast, competing with a Chinese bid for a route to Daqing. Relations were said to be entering a new, businesslike phase following the January 2003 summit between President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. But as in the latter half of the twentieth century, the territorial dispute remained the touchstone for Russo-Japanese relations.

See also: kuril islands; russo-japanese war

bibliography

Ivanov, Vladimir I., and Smith, Karla S., eds. (1999). Japan and Russia in Northeast Asia: Partners in the 21st Century. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Kimura, Hiroshi. (2000). Distant Neighbors, Vol. 1: Japanese-Russian Relations under Brezhnev and Andropov; Vol. 2: Japanese-Russian Relations under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Nimmo, William F. (1994). Japan and Russia: A Reevaluation in the Post-Soviet Era. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Rozman, Gilbert, ed. (2000). Japan and Russia: The Tortuous Path to Normalization, 1949-1999. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Charles E. Ziegler