ABSTRACT
The territorial dispute between Japan and Russia revolves around the islands of Etorofu (Itrup in Russian), Kunashiri (Kunashir), Shikotan and the Habomai archipelago, which, combined, came to be referred to in Japan as the “Northern Territories” (NTs). The islands are located in close proximity to and east of Hokkaido, the northernmost of the main four islands that constitute the Japanese archipelago. The total territory of the islands is about five thousand square kilometers; since September 1945 the Soviet Union (and from 1992 onwards Russia) has exercised de facto control over the islands. While the islands are often referred to as being part of the Kurile archipelago, the question of whether they are an integral part of the Kurile chain (as well as whether “Kuriles” is identical with the Japanese name “Chishima”), which stretches from the Kamchatka Peninsula to Hokkaido, is one of the fundamental issues of the dispute. Namely, the Japanese side argues that the two southernmost islands of Shikotan and the Habomais constitute an integral part of Hokkaido, while Etorofu and Kunashiri are referred to as the Southern Kuriles (Minami Chishima) to distinguish them from the “Kuriles,” the rights to which Japan renounced in the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951. On the other hand, the Soviet/Russian side claims all the islands to be part of the Kuriles and refers to Etorofu and Kunashiri as an integral part of the Great Kuriles (Bol’shaia Kuril’skaia griada), and to Shikotan and the Habomais as the Lesser Kuriles (Malaia Kuril’skaia griada). This discrepancy between the two conceptions and its relevance to the dispute will be explained later in the chapter. As a result of the centrality of the issue in bilateral relations and the con-
tinuous discord in Soviet/Russian and Japanese dominant narratives on the history of the islands, there exists a vast amount of related academic literature in both Japanese and English and, to a lesser degree, in Russian. Combined, it contains a comprehensive and probably exhaustive analysis of the early explorations of the islands by Japanese and Russians, the history of the Japanese and the Soviet possession of the islands and the half century (1955 till the present day) of bilateral attempts to reach a mutually satisfactory solution to the dispute. In terms of English-language scholarship, John J. Stephan’s The Kuril Islands (1974), Peter Berton’s white paper titled “The
Japanese-Russian Territorial Dilemma: Historical Background, Disputes, Issues, Questions, Solution Scenarios” (1992) and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s The Northern Territories Dispute and Russo-Japanese Relations (1998 and 1998a) stand out in their objective and comprehensive analyses and their extensive coverage of primary and secondary material in the Japanese, Russian and English languages. One must also mention Kimie Hara’s Japanese-Soviet/ Russian Relations since 1945: A Difficult Peace (1998), which provides a concise and informative analysis of the post-war bilateral attempts to negotiate a peace treaty, as well as some important findings about the origins of the dispute. The purpose of this chapter is not to contest the historical facts or the
arguments presented in the above-mentioned scholarship. As the main interest of the present study is the construction of Japan’s national identity, the central issue that this chapter seeks to explore is the question of how the islands came to be narrated within the dominant discourse as inherent Japanese territory (nihon no koyu-no ryo-do) in spite of the rather recent history of Japan’s colonization of the islands along with other Ainu territories. The contestation of this dominant conception of the islands by the Ainu groups in Japan is occasionally mentioned in the existing scholarship (for example, Berton 1992). However, in general the question of the Ainu, who constitute one of the smallest ethnic minorities in today’s Japan, has been largely ignored by the existing scholarship, which tends to focus on state-level relations.1 In this context the lack of interest in the Ainu is quite understandable; since the early days of the colonization of their territories by both Russia and Japan, they have played no significant role in the process that determined their lives. However, the Ainu “other” played an important role in the construction of
Japan’s identity and, since the early days of Japan’s exposure to Russia, the two “others” (Russia and Ainu) had a close relationship in Japan’s cognition of the “self.” Hence, after a brief introduction that outlines the place of the disputed islands in the Japanese conception of their territory in the prewar and immediate post-war years, this chapter turns to examine the discourse on the Ainu place within Japan’s modern history, which emerged in the 1970s, and the challenge it posed to the dominant narrative on the NTs. As will be argued below, the question of the Ainu and the subsequent contestation of the notion of “inherent territory” as applied to the NTs emerged within the broader struggle over the definition of Japan’s national identity between the conservative and the progressive narratives. The next chapter examines the Russia-related writings of one of the most
popular contemporary narrators of Japan’s identity, Shiba Ryo-taro-. It demonstrates that through a historico-cultural construction of Japan and Russia the contestation of the “inherent territory” narrative was suppressed, and submerged the Ainu subjectivity within Japan’s national identity. Through a narrative on the Russian “other,” which belongs to the same discursive formation examined in the previous chapter, it is argued that this construction re-legitimized Japan’s possession over the islands.
