The Kurillian Knot

A History of Japanese-Russian Border Negotiations

Hiroshi Kimura, Mark Ealey

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780804786829
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

This book provides an answer to the mystery of why no peace treaty has yet been signed between Japan and Russia after more than sixty years since the end of World War Two. The author, a leading authority on Japanese-Russian diplomatic history, was trained at the Russian Institute of Columbia University. This volume contributes to our understanding of not only the intricacies of bilateral relations between Moscow and Tokyo, but, more generally, of Russia's and Japan's modes of foreign policy formation. The author also discusses the U.S. factor, which helped make Russia and Japan distant neighbors, and the threat from China, which might help these countries come closer in the near future. It would be hardly possible to discuss the future prospects of Northeast Asia without having first read this book.

CHAPTER 1

Waking Up to the Concept of National Borders

In the Fog

In the Northern Territories (which the Russians call the Southern Kuriles), mist and fog are indivisible. In protest against the Soviet seizure of the Habomai group of islets, along with the islands of Shikotan, Kunashiri, and Etorofu (hereafter for brevity described as “the four islands”) between August 28 and September 5, 1945, that same period is annually designated “Northern Territories Reversion Month,” and protest meetings are held in and around Nemuro City in Hokkaido. Ironically, every year about half of those who plan to attend these meetings find themselves foiled because thick fog causes cancellation of flights into Kushiro Airport, forcing them to give up or rush to find ground transport and arrive after the meetings have started.

In fact the Northern Territories, and the Kurile Archipelago stretching north from there, are notorious for thick fogs. These originate in the North Pacific in March and April, and by mid-May have started edging northwest to cover the Kuriles, stubbornly clinging to them through the summer months before eventually dissipating in autumn. July has an average of twenty-five and August normally more than twenty “fog days.” This fog, called “gas” by Hokkaido locals, begins to dissipate in September-October, drifting away across the Sea of Okhotsk. It rarely appears from November onward.

Tsarist Russian Captain Vasilii Mikhailovich Golovnin, commander of the sloop-of-war Diana, and very familiar with both the Kurile region and the Japanese, wrote in his Memoirs of Captivity in Japan: 1811–1813, “All navigators who have sailed in the seas I had to traverse complain of the cloudy weather and excessively thick fogs, which prevented them from approaching the coasts, and consequently from making any observations of them.”When in the area in 1810, he wrote, “I was convinced by experience of the truth of the complaint.” He later added, “Both on the way there and back we had rough and hazy weather, and the horizon was constantly hidden by heavy clouds. All, therefore, that convinced me that fogs might be considered as proper to that sea ... and that there was in no season good and clear weather for more than a week together.”¹

A Swedish zoologist, Sten Bergman, who traveled in the vicinity of the four islands in autumn 1922, described in the opening passages of a book “the dense fog unique to the Kuriles” and “the impenetrably thick fog.” He wrote, “This must be the thickest fog around any group of islands in the world.” He continued:

Those of us on the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry survey vessel Hakuho soon warmed to Captain Yamamoto and his crew. The captain and most of his senior staff spoke excellent English and told us that they have sailed the waters around the Kuriles many times and that this region is known for having the thickest fog of any area in the world, making navigation around the islands an extremely difficult and indeed dangerous task. The cruise schedule is completely determined by the weather, and the largest impediments to traveling in the region are posed by the persistent fog in summer and the blizzard conditions in winter.... I awoke at 7 a.m. the next day just as the ship pulled up the anchor.... Before long, Nemuro disappeared from sight, and within an hour we were enveloped in a bank of that dense fog unique to the Kuriles.²

Now let me explain why I have chosen to open the first chapter of this book with this topic of impenetrable fog around the Kuriles.

Who first discovered the Kurile region and the island of Sakhalin? Who first settled them on a permanent basis? When did they come under a specific nation’s sovereignty? All three are reasonable and justifiable questions, and also of immediate relevance in the contemporary context. Today, national boundaries in every corner of the globe are delimited so strictly that mere centimeters of inexactitude are unacceptable. To this day, the sovereignty of the four islands northeast of Hokkaido remains a contentious issue between Japan and Russia. Difficult though it may be to believe, a clear perception of national borders in the Kuriles, Sakhalin, and their surrounding region took root among the peoples of Japan and Russia not much more than one hundred years ago. Until then, however, this region was seen as murky and indistinct, like its interminable fogs.

Because the Northern Territories issue has been the subject of intense political conflict between Japan and tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation, a mistaken perception has arisen that both countries have been at each other’s throats over national borders since the very beginning of their respective histories. This view has come about as a result of seeing the histories of both countries, and of the region itself, in the context of current perception of the problem. If we view this region solely in terms of the modern notion of national borders, and through a “prism of territorial rivalry,” we risk seeing only a distorted image.³

Professor Toshiyuki Akizuki, formerly of the Law Faculty of Hokkaido University and the most preeminent researcher into early Russo-Japanese relations, considers that the Japanese did not come to consider the notion of national boundaries until the end of the eighteenth century. He wrote, “One would think that by the mid-seventeenth century, when the Tokugawa Bakufu (shogunate government) issued the Order for National Seclusion, forbidding both travel to foreign countries by Japanese and the entry to of foreigners to Japan, Japan’s national boundaries, surrounded as they were by sea on all sides, must have been clear. However, in actual fact ... north of Japan, there lay a boundless expanse of land unfettered by national boundaries.”⁴ Akizuki continued, “Certainly, until the eighteenth century ... with regard to Yezo (Hokkaido), the Japanese did not have any ‘clear perception of their own territorial borders’—and more accurately speaking, it can be presumed they did not even possess the notion of national borders.Yezo, in the broad sense, represented the land where the Ainu lived, the Japanese of the day had only the vaguest knowledge about its expanses, and it is doubtful that they even viewed their own outposts in Yezo as their own country’s territory.”⁵

The same applies equally to the Russians of the day. Again according to Akizuki, the first wave of fur trappers moving eastward toward Siberia at the end of the sixteenth century had already reached the Pacific seaboard by the mid-seventeenth century, from which time on they would have known of Japan as the “country over the sea.” But at this stage, the Russians “would have had only the vaguest perception of the expanse of sea in front of them, knowing nothing of how far it stretched, what countries could be found at its outer limits and who might be living in such lands.”⁶ The only information the Russians possessed about Japan at this time came from Mercator maps imported from the Netherlands. It was even thought that the “Famous Great Japanese Islands” stretched from the Amur River in the north to the Chinese coastline in the south.⁷

A Western authority on early Russo-Japanese relations, Professor John Stephan of the University of Hawaii, holds the same view as Akizuki: “A Russo-Japanese frontier developed almost imperceptibly over a period of years, during which national boundaries in the modern sense of the word did not exist. Until the nineteenth century, neither Russia nor Japan had a clear conception of how far its sovereignty extended in the Kuriles.”⁸

Both countries awoke to the notion of national boundaries as the result of external stimuli.⁹ Where there was no contact with the outside world, there was no need to draw clear lines between oneself and others, or between inside and outside, but when broader international forces began to intrude into one’s sphere of activity, the notion of adjoining only something out there in the fog no longer sufficed.¹⁰ This created a need to delimit one’s own territory and in turn gave birth to the notion of national boundaries. One task involved in deciding the physical extent of national territory was the making of maps, and that necessitated dispatching survey teams and expeditions.

The Birth and Development of Territorial Awareness

The Matsumae clan (han), given control over Hokkaido during the shogunate, differentiated between the areas where Japanese (Wajin) and Ainu resided, terming the former “Land of Matsumae,” and the latter “Land of Yezo.” Then, just how far north did the Matsumae clan judge the Land of Yezo to extend?

History has it that in 1599 the first domain chief of the Matsumae clan, Yoshihiro Matsumae, presented to Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa, as a mark of his fealty, a map titled Matsumae Chizu (Map of Matsumae), featuring Yezo in its entirety. Unfortunately this map has not survived, so how Yezo was depicted is beyond our imagination.¹¹

In later years the Matsumae clan frequently submitted maps of the region on orders from the shogunate. The oldest of those was drawn in response to a shogunate directive of 1644 for all clans to contribute to a national project to create a map of the entire country. While this also does not survive, it is represented as part of a later Map of Japan from the Shohō Period.

In 1633, eleven years before submitting this map, the Matsumae clan had surveyed tracks in Yezo in preparation for the first inspection tour by shogunate representatives, and in 1635 clan retainers were dispatched on an “island tour,” instructed to create a map of the Land of Yezo. We can safely say that by then preparations for drafting the map ordered by the shogunate in 1644 had already been completed. The Map of Japan from the Shoho Period was judged the most authoritative cartographical depiction of the northern regions at that time, and for many years it, or later revised versions, was used whenever there was need to refer to maps of the Land of Yezo. Later revisions, such as the map the Matsumae clan submitted to the shogunate in 1700, as part of the Genroku National Map, were little changed. The late Shinichiro Takakura (professor emeritus of Hokkaido University and renowned authority on northern region maps) thought the Matsumae map of the Land of Yezo currently in Hakodate Municipal Museum to be closest to the original Map of Japan from the Shoho Period.

In short, as effectively drafted by the sole executive power on Hokkaido, the Matsumae clan, and used in the national map compiled by the shogunate, it is reasonable to assume that the Map of Japan from the Shoho Period was the most authoritative map of that time. Indeed this was the first map drawn by Japanese that included Karafuto and the Kurile Archipelago. This is likely to be the reason why it appears as Item 1 in the Joint Compendium of Documents on the History of the Territorial Demarcation Between Russia and Japan compiled by the Japanese and Russian Ministries of Foreign Affairs. The Joint Compendium is the collaborative work of the Japanese and Russian foreign ministers. It was originally scheduled to be signed by the two countries’ leaders during Yeltsin’s visit to Tokyo in September 1992, but since Yeltsin did not go to Tokyo at that time, it was simultaneously released by the two governments in September 1992. This compendium originally contained thirty-five documents, then seven more were added. These historical documents were formulated on the basis of mutual agreement between Russia and Japan, and they not only date from the pre-1956 Soviet Union but also from tsarist Russia. English translations of all forty-two documents are found in the Appendix in this book.¹²

However, its historical significance aside, in cartographical terms the Map of Japan from the Shoho Period is extremely inaccurate. Although records state that the cartographers made an “island tour,” in fact they did so not by surveying the coastline from points on land, but by sailing around the islands. Places that could not be reached, particularly inland locations, were depicted on the basis of interviews with local Ainu or others familiar with those areas. So, apart from the southern tip of Hokkaido, the Matsumae domain, the map is inaccurate. The area denoted as the Land of Yezo is particularly poorly represented, and Sakhalin is depicted as much smaller than Hokkaido. The Kuriles are drawn not as an Archipelago but as one entity, and although the islands’ names are included, depiction of their order and size is random.

The years 1772 to 1786, when Okitsugu Tanuma was a chief senior councilor to the shogunate, may have gone down in history as a period dominated by corruption, but those years were also a time when Japanese awareness of and interest in Russia to the north was refined. Tanuma was a mercantilist who sought to enrich the nation by promoting trade with the outside world. He chanced to be sent a book, Akayezo fusetsu ko (1783; A study of Red-Yezo [i.e., Russian] reports) by Heisuke Kudo, a court physician from Sendai Domain and medical practitioner in Edo. Kudo’s book was based on information acquired from Genzaemon Minato, former superintendent of Matsumae clan finances, about the arrival of Russians in the Land of Yezo and knowledge of Russia that the renowned interpreter of Dutch, Kogyu Yoshio, had gleaned from Dutch books. It represented the first Japanese book about Russians, called “red people” because they arrived in the Land of Yezo in scarlet clothing.

One background factor behind Kudo’s writing this book was a letter sent in 1771 to the officers-in-chief of the Factory of the Dutch East India Company (opperhoofd) in Nagasaki by Hungarian Baron Mauritius von Benyowsky, warning that the Russians were preparing to seize the islands close to the Land of Yezo.¹³ The content of this letter was clearly false, as at that stage the Russians had neither capability nor intention to invade Japanese territory, but the Dutch in Nagasaki may have used it in an attempt to deter the Japanese from entering into a trading relationship with Russia, and Kudo in fact suggested in his book that this was their motivation.¹⁴ He argued that on the contrary, by actively seeking to enter into trade with Russia, the Japanese would develop an understanding of it, thus enabling them to put in place appropriate policies for dealing with encroachment from the north. This suggestion struck a chord with Tanuma’s mercantile thinking.

Shihei Hayashi of the same Sendai clan as Kudo wrote both the Illustrated Survey of Three Countries (1785) and Kaikoku Heidan (Military discussion for a maritime nation) (1787–91), not only proposing that Japan acquire the Land of Yezo before Russia, but also vigorously advocating a strong naval defense. In 1785 Hayashi compiled the Map of the Island of Yezo, which Professor Takakura describes as “a blend of old Japanese and new Western-made maps”—a combination of traditional Japanese cartographic skills with European geographical and other information imported via China.

It was during the Tanuma years that the first Japanese explorers were dispatched to Yezo. The most famous member of these expeditions was Tokunai Mogami, protégé of the Edo-period political economist Toshiaki Honda. Mogami surveyed Kunashiri, Etorofu, and Uruppu before creating A Map of All the Islands of Yezo (1790). This map gives the Russian names of is...