Kurile Islands

Kurile Islands. These extend south of the USSR's Kamchatka peninsula to Hokkaido, Japan, and form the boundary between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean. They are made up of more than 30 islands, and in the Soviet view are judged to include the four islands of Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan, and the Habomai, which are immediately adjacent to Hokkaido, and which Japanese usage calls ‘the northern territories’. The Kuriles were administered as part of Hokkaido after the Treaty of St Petersburg in 1875, but were later the subject of dispute between Japan and the Russian Empire.

Soviet seizure of the Kuriles (see Map 58) as part of a campaign that opened on 9 August 1945 (see Japanese–Soviet campaigns) was based on the secret Yalta agreements (see ARGONAUT). At Yalta, the USA and UK agreed that the Kurile Islands would be handed over to the USSR, in return for Soviet entry into the Pacific war. They were formally declared Soviet territory in September 1945 and from 1947 administered as part of the Sakhalin district. The Japanese population of the four islands was forcibly expelled.

The Japanese government defined the four islands of ‘the northern territories’ as inalienable Japanese lands and made repeated calls for their retrocession. Japan's claim was based on the assertion that they do not form part of the main Kurile chain which was the subject of the dispute with tsarist Russia and which Japan renounced in the San Francisco peace treaty of 1952. They were never in Russian possession before 1945, and had always constituted an integral part of Japan.

The USSR, which did not sign the peace treaty, took the position that under a series of international agreements all the Kurile Islands legitimately became part of its own territory. When the then Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, visited Japan in April 1991, he agreed that ‘the northern territories’ should be subject to negotiation, and discussions concerning their status were begun.

Hatano Sumio