By Vindu Mai Chotani
Talks are again underway. Can the two countries remove the main obstacle to stronger ties?
On September 21, Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida traveled to Russia for bilateral talks with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. This was the first visit by a Japanese foreign minister to Russia since Shinzo Abe took over as Japanese prime minister in December 2012. Relations between Tokyo and Moscow, frostier in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, are one of the key components of the world’s major power dynamics. This meeting has come at a crucial time, when Tokyo and Moscow can either compromise and work through issues plaguing their bilateral relationship, or can once again watch any attempts of reconciliation fall apart.
The Ukraine crisis effectively ended the rapprochement between the Japan and Russia. Wanting to stay in line with other members of the Group of Seven industrialized nations, Tokyo was left with little choice but to impose sanctions on Russia. Despite many of these sanctions being cosmetic in nature, Russia viewed this move as Tokyo’s inability to take foreign policy decisions independent of its closest ally, the U.S. Since then, Moscow and Tokyo have struggled to see eye to eye on a number of issues.
The territorial dispute over the Russian administered Southern Kurils, which the Japanese claim as the Northern Territories, has been the main obstacle to the two nations signing a peace treaty to formally end the Second World War. Claims over these four disputed islands – Iturup (known in Japanese as Etorofu), Kunashir (Kunashiri), Shikotan, and the rocky Habomai islets – have been muddied by a series of historical treaties such as the Portsmouth Treaty of 1905, the Potsdam Declaration of 1945, and the San Francisco Peace treaty of 1951.
Thus, technically still at war, Tokyo and Moscow have tried on numerous occasions to reach an agreement on this issue, always without success. Japan has on numerous occasions rejected a Russian offer to settle the dispute with the return of two out of the four islands, namely the Habomai islets and Shikotan, since these islands comprise only 7 percent of the total land mass in dispute. The closest either country has come to settling this dispute was in 1997. At that time, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto shared a good rapport, and Tokyo hoped to settle the dispute with the “Kawana” proposal. However, later that fall, Moscow rejected the proposal, and the issue has remained a thorn in the side of bilateral relations ever since.
Read the full story at The Diplomat