Islands Apart

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin descended on Japan last week, accompanied by a dozen governors and more than 100 Russian business leaders. Yet the visit failed to break the impasse in Russian-Japanese relations over the four islands east of Hokkaido, which Russia seized in 1945. This means that the two countries are still without a peace treaty and an agreed mutual border 64 years after the end of World War II.

Japan needs Russian energy, and Russia needs Japanese technology and managerial expertise. With the Sakhalin oil and gas projects finally coming on stream, bilateral trade has doubled twice in the past five years, reaching $29 billion. The one concrete result of Putin's visit was an agreement to step up cooperation in nuclear power generation.

Japan will double the amount of uranium it buys from Russia (currently, Russia supplies 12 percent of Japan's demand) and will send waste for reprocessing to Russia, subject to International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. There will also be a joint venture for building new plants.

But there was zero progress on the Northern Territories issue. Back in 1956, the Soviet Union had offered to return the two smaller, southern island groups of Shikotan and Habomai. Japan rejected the offer and continues to insist that the islands were illegally seized, having never previously been claimed by the Soviet Union or tsarist Russia. As recently as 2001, Russia was still floating the possibility of a two-island solution, but since then Putin has effectively declared the issue closed. During a February summit with Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, President Dmitry Medvedev called for "original, nonstandard approaches" to the question, which the Japanese eagerly interpreted as a possible sign of the Kremlin's new flexibility on the issue.

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But after Medvedev's statement, Russia did not come up with any new proposals. Then in an interview with the Mainichi Daily News on April 17, Shotaro Yachi, a former deputy foreign minister and current adviser to Aso, suggested that the four islands be split 50-50. But instead of offering the idea of splitting up the four islands according to two to each country, Yachi suggested a 50-50 split according to land area. The problem with this idea is that Habomai and Shikotan account for only 7 percent of the 5,000 square kilometers of the disputed islands. So a 50-50 territorial division would give Japan the two smaller islands plus Kunashiri, and it would also give Japan a chunk of the largest island, Etoforu. In the end, however, Yashi's idea was promptly denounced by the entire Japanese political class, who insist on the demand of "four or nothing."

The idea that Russia, having control of four islands, would turn around and hand over three and a quarter of them, demonstrates Japan's unwillingness to confront the reality of Moscow's intransigence.

Why is Japan so intractable on this issue? The best pragmatic explanation is that Japan is waiting for Russia's economic boom to burst. Tokyo should patiently wait for the day when a weak Russia, isolated from Europe and challenged by a rising China, will be in desperate need of Japanese cash and economic partnership.

Another possible argument is that Japan has grown accustomed to the fuzzy diplomatic status quo. Strategic ambiguity is arguably useful not just for Japan, but also for Russia and China; none of them wants to be drawn into binding alliances with a regional partner that could alarm the other neighbors.

For its part, Japan sees it as a matter of moral and legal principle. In some respects, the nonreturn of the islands has become integral to Japan's political identity. It enables Japan to continue seeing itself as a victim of the vengeful Allies in 1945. First, the Americans dropped the atom bomb twice. Then the Soviet Union, after entering the Pacific theater of World War II on Aug. 9, 1945, seized territories occupied by the Japanese Empire and expelled Japanese citizens not just from the Northern Territories but also 3 million Japanese from Sakhalin and Manchuria. Thus the politics of national identity are trumping the politics of national interest.

At a May 10 news conference in Moscow, a Japanese journalist asked Putin about the prospects for a 50-50 territorial split of the islands. Putin carefully replied that "the art of politics amounts to a search for acceptable compromise" and went on to point out that the Japanese government has not yet made a concrete proposal.

More broadly, Putin's rhetoric during the recent Tokyo visit held out some vague hope of future flexibility -- that is, if Japan proves itself to be a good friend and partner of Russia. For example, Alexander Shokhin, the head of the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs who accompanied Putin to Tokyo, pointed out that Japan is holding back from funding the completion of the 4,118-kilometer pipeline -- which will be the world's longest -- that would carry oil from the Irkutsk region to Perevoznaya Bay, near Vladivostok, to be exported to Asian and U.S. markets.

According to Kommersant journalist Andrei Kolesnikov, at the final news conference on May 12 Aso had to pretend that the islands issue had been discussed when it was pretty clear from Putin that it had not. Aso is now looking forward to his meeting with Medvedev at the Group of Eight summit in July. But between now and then, Japan had better come up with something better than offering the Russians the chance to keep three-fourths of an island.

Peter Rutland is a professor of government at Wesleyan University and an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.