More than six decades after World War II, Russia and Japan have yet to conclude a peace treaty, largely because of an unresolved dispute over some islands east of Hokkaido. Moscow calls them the “Southern Kuriles.” Tokyo insists that they are not Kuriles but Japan's “Northern Territories.” Conventional wisdom assumes that the impasse has a solution. So far none has been found, but plenty have been spotted. In 1953, the New York Times speculated that Moscow might give up the Kuriles to woo Japan from the U.S. alliance. Thereafter, the media detected glints of a breakthrough in Khrushchev's gesture, Kosygin's smile, Gromyko's migraine, Brezhnev's demise, Gorbachev's gab, and Yeltsin's flippancy. As the Soviet Union tottered, expectations acquired a cachet of authority. Henry Kissinger declared in 1991 that Japan would get the islands in a couple of years. A cottage industry of rosy Northern Territories scenarios sprang up along the Potomac and the Charles. With such a pedigree, both volumes under review are in good, or at least numerous, company.
Hiroshi Kimura's The Kurillian Knot was originally published in 1993 by a commercial press in Tokyo. Its English title, suggested by the translator, catches the eye in ways not intended by the author, who confirmed that “Kurillian” is an error (“Kurilian” is standard for the archipelago). The title also belies the contents, which distinguish the Northern Territories from the Kurile Islands. Repackaged as an academic monograph, The Kurillian Knot gained a scholarly aspect and lost a revealing subtitle: “How do we tackle the territorial problem?”
Kimura is a veteran observer, knowledgeable commentator, and prolific author among a comparatively small number of specialists on Russo-Japanese relations. He is conversant in the literature of the field, and, unlike many who write about the subject, he has taken the trouble to learn the relevant languages.
The Kurillian Knot opens with a historical survey but focuses on postwar negotiations. It identifies the strategies, stakes, and styles of both countries. It illuminates the differences between Moscow's “two island” offer and Tokyo's “four island” claim. It appraises the involvement of the United States and China. Appendices bring together documents compiled by the Russian and Japanese foreign ministries. Concluding on an upbeat note, the author asserts that a four-island solution is attainable if Russia is properly pressured and Japan properly mobilized.
The Kurillian Knot is touted on the jacket as “most scholarly.” It would be more accurate to say that it deploys scholarship to plead Japan's case. Arguments rarely stray far from those of the Foreign Ministry, whose Bureau of Public Relations provided all of The Kurillian Knot's illustrations. The historical narrative uses evidence with politic discretion. To underscore Japan's priority in the Southern Kuriles, it highlights a 1798 episode in which a shogunal retainer erected a stake claiming Iturup, but it does not mention that he tore down Russian stakes already on the island. Nor does it mention that the Japanese military used the Kuriles to raid Kamchatka during the Russo-Japanese War and to obstruct Soviet shipping during World War II.
For a monograph published at a university press, The Kurillian Knot contains a surprising number of elementary errors, most of which are by-products of the translation. It garbles sakoku, misconstrues the nomenclature of Russo-Japanese borderlands, misdates the Opium and Crimean wars, misplaces Changkufeng, and conflates Nikolaevsk with Komsomolsk.
Shortcomings aside, The Kurillian Knot makes a useful addition to the Anglophone literature on Russo-Japanese relations. Its recapitulation of post-1956 negotiations is meticulous. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's works, unaccountably overlooked in The Kurillian Knot, offer more balanced interpretations.
Northern Territories and The Kurillian Knot are a symbiotic pair. Their creators salute each other with compliments, citations, and blurbs. The Kurillian Knot inspired the subtitle of Northern Territories: “Untying the Kurillian Knot.” Beyond these courtesies, the two volumes have little in common. One makes a brief; the other has makings of a breviary.
Northern Territories opens with a paean to Nitobe Inazô (1862–1933), the author of Bushido: Soul of Japan and a conflicted spokesman for the Japanese empire. While serving as a League of Nations undersecretary in 1921, Nitobe arbitrated a dispute between Finland and Sweden over the Ålands, an island group that was part of the Russian empire from 1809 until 1917. An official in the Nitobe Foundation exhorted, “You should start writing on the case of the Åland Island [sic] to solve our Northern Territorial issue with Russia!” (p. xix). Word got around. In 2006, interested parties convened in the Åland port of Mariehamn (named after the consort of Czar Alexander II). Northern Territories harvests the fruits of their labors.
Like most conference volumes, Northern Territories is a mixed bag. The papers of Konstantin Sarkisov, Nobuo Shimotomai, and Geoffrey Jukes focus on Russo-Japanese relations and do not even mention the Ålands. Nor does Richard Halloran's paper on U.S. views on the Northern Territories. Elisabeth Nauclér surveys Åland history and institutions without commenting on their relevance to the Kurile issue. Hiroshi Kimura commends the “Åland inspiration” as an afterthought to a paper on the Northern Territories issue within Japan. In a foreword, James Kelly allows that an Åland model “might give rise to a solution” (p. xvii). In another foreword, Fumiko Halloran hopes that people will keep looking for an “Åland solution to the Northern Territorial issue” (p. xx).
Three contributors do the heavy lifting. In “The Indigenous Ainu of Japan at the Time of the Åland Settlement,” Scott Harrison endorses “bringing the Ainu to the table” (p. 104). In “Solving the Territorial Dispute between Japan and Russia,” Markku Heiskanen posits that Åland-style multilateral frameworks, autonomous zones, minority rights, demilitarization, and neutralization might work in the Kuriles (p. 110). In “Envisioning Åland-Inspired Solutions for the Northern Territories Problem,” Kimie Hara reiterates that the “Åland experience” offers “an attractive model for the Northern Territories future” (p. 120). None of the contributors subjects the volume's central thesis to critical scrutiny. None answers the question, how does the Åland model fit into Russia's political calculus?
Aside from the startling discovery that there were no border disputes over the Kuriles before World War II (p. 4), the most impressive achievement of Northern Territories is that it manages to do away with human nature. There is a certain charm in the notion that Vladimir Putin might someday have a Nitobe moment and exclaim, “If Sweden and Finland learned how to share some islands that were once ours, we can learn how to share islands that are now ours!”
Russia and Japan have been elbowing each other in Northeast Asia since both expanded toward the Sea of Okhotsk centuries ago. Soviet seizure of the Kuriles in 1945 did not create a new problem; it reconfigured an old one. Hiroshi Kimura calls the impasse, now in its seventh decade, “abnormal” (p. 141). He has a point. Such a long interim of peaceful, stable frontiers is abnormal for such restless neighbors.
