Old Issue Chills Ties With Kremlin : Japanese Can’t Get Over Soviet Occupation of Isles

Imagine if the Soviets occupied Santa Catalina and this community were Long Beach. Or if Russians came to Nantucket Island and Martha’s Vineyard 43 years ago, deported the locals to Cape Cod and announced they were staying--forever.

In fact, they are dug in at about that distance from here. On a clear day one can see signs of them on Kunashiri Island, about 15 miles away, and watch their ships patrolling waters across the Japan-Soviet maritime border, which threads the Notsuke Channel less than 8 miles offshore.

How they got there, and what the Japanese are trying to do to get rid of them, is a long and complicated story that is riddled with human tragedy, Cold War polemics and diplomatic intransigence.

The Japanese government regards Soviet occupation of the disputed Northern Territories--Kunashiri, two other nearby islands and a group of tiny islets--as a violation of international law and an intolerable affront to Japan’s sovereignty.

But to many of the men who ply the sea for a living out of this small port on the east coast of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost main island, the Soviet encampment across the water is a mundane fact of life that seems unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Their major gripe is that they are being barred from some choice fishing grounds.

The Northern Territories issue is an old problem that takes on new meaning now as Japan gradually assumes more of the trappings of a world power.

Beyond the minor question of local fishing rights, this seemingly intractable stalemate is the only major diplomatic issue on Tokyo’s agenda that is not motivated by the overarching commercial interests that have traditionally shaped its postwar foreign policy.

It is essentially a matter of national honor, and as such, the way it is played out may foreshadow how Japan will conduct its diplomacy in the future. For while the United States and most of the rest of the world have responded to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s perestroika-- restructuring -- initiatives with a positive warming trend, Japan stands out as rigid and suspicious.

“We cannot shake their hands,” a Foreign Ministry official said, “when they are stepping on our toes.”

Joint Venture

Tokyo hopes the Northern Territories issue will be taken up seriously for the first time in 15 years when Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze visits Japan on Dec. 19. Officials and Soviet watchers are pessimistic, however, about the prospects for any real progress.

The situation has remained so stagnant over the last four decades that one of Shibetsu’s fishermen, Tadaichi Shiiku, 53, decided to take diplomacy into his own hands.

Shiiku, a descendant of Japan’s aboriginal Ainu people, provoked the ire of the Foreign Ministry earlier this year by striking a joint-venture deal with a Soviet fishing company to set up a breeding farm for sea trout on the Soviet side of the channel. He also became the first Japanese to receive a Soviet fishing permit for use in the disputed territorial waters.

“What he did was very dangerous,” said the Foreign Ministry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The Northern Territories are Japanese soil, and for him to seek legal permission from the Soviets to establish a joint venture there undermines our position.”

Shiiku ultimately caved into Foreign Ministry pressure in September and agreed to move his fish-farm nets to the Hokkaido side of the channel. Ironically, a typhoon damaged the relocated nets at the end of October, and about 17 tons of fish swam to freedom. Shiiku laughs about his loss, then lashes out at the government.

“I had no intention of recognizing Soviet sovereignty over Kunashiri--I just wanted to adapt to reality, to be flexible,” Shiiku said. “I used to think the Soviets were the ones who put up the Iron Curtain, but in this case it was the Japanese Foreign Ministry.”

The Northern Territories dispute has put a chill on Japan-Soviet relations ever since they were renewed after World War II. Although the two countries established formal diplomatic ties in 1956, no peace treaty was ever signed because of disagreement over the ownership of the islands, which Soviet troops grabbed when they hopped down the Kurile chain after Japan’s surrender at the end of the war.

Japan insists that further negotiations on a peace treaty and any significant improvement in bilateral relations can come only after the Northern Territories matter is resolved.

Moscow has responded to Tokyo’s strident rhetoric on the issue with icy silence, denying the existence of a territorial dispute after rescinding an initial offer to return one of the islands, Shikotan, and the tiny islets, the Habomai group, once a peace treaty is signed.

Tokyo’s position is that it will remain in a technical state of hostility with the Soviet Union until all of the disputed islands are returned. Limited cultural exchanges and trade ties are allowed, but large-scale investment and economic cooperation, the kind that the Soviets need to develop Siberia, are discouraged.

Lagging Behind

With the rebirth of U.S.-Soviet detente, rapprochement between the Soviet Union and China and budding Soviet trade links with staunchly anti-Communist South Korea, some critics warn that Japan now lags far behind these countries.

“The Northern Territories issue is a carry-over from a previous era that is not commensurate with Japan’s new status as a superpower,” said Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, a professor at Hokkaido University’s Slavic Research Center.

Hasegawa advocates improving relations on other fronts--such as crisis management and disarmament--to help defuse the menacing Soviet military might in the Far East before attempting to settle the territorial dispute.

“I think it’s totally disproportionate to make this issue the cornerstone of Japan’s East-West policy,” Hasegawa said. “We have a bigger role to play, and sometimes we don’t realize how grave our responsibilities are. Our influence is global, but our political vision is regional.”

The Soviets, meanwhile, have demonstrated a growing interest in Asia. Gorbachev has said in major policy speeches--in the Sea of Japan port of Vladivostok two years ago and again in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk in September--that the Soviet Union sees for itself a greater role in regional economic and political affairs.

For example, Moscow now wants to become a full member of the Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference, a private organization that aims to encourage development in the region. But that bid has been blocked by the group’s sponsors in Tokyo.

Analysts say the Soviet Union feels it has “missed the bus” in the boom enjoyed by the vibrant, newly industrialized economies of Asia. It wants to tap this pool of energy and mid-level technology to help retool its aging industrial plant under the perestroika program.

From Japan, it seeks investment in such projects as the gigantic petrochemical complex planned for Nizhnevartovsk in western Siberia. A consortium of Japanese companies has reportedly signed a preliminary agreement to build the plant, which would be worth up to $6 billion.

But that project would appear to be the exception, not the rule. Politically mandated restraint remains a factor, but in general, Japanese industry is wary of large-scale Siberian development projects because of the bottom line.

“If Japanese companies saw profits, they’d find a way to overcome the political barriers,” said Shigeki Hakamada, a Soviet specialist at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo.

It is far from clear whether the Soviets perceive the need to soften their stance on the Northern Territories, which they claim were granted to them by wartime parleys among the Allied powers, in order to court public opinion and win more enthusiastic cooperation from Japan.

Soviet authorities have not committed themselves to acting on the territorial dispute beyond vague intimations, released indirectly through academic and journalistic sources: chiefly the message that they no longer refuse to acknowledge that there is a problem.

“They are creating the impression that Soviet leadership is more flexible and Japan should respond,” the Japanese Foreign Ministry official said. “But if you look at the facts, their position hasn’t changed at all.”

Shiiku, the Ainu fisherman, began his odyssey through Cold War polemics last May when he led a folk dance troupe on a cultural exchange mission to the Soviet island of Sakhalin, which lies directly north of Hokkaido.

Representatives of a Soviet fishing company approached him with an offer he could not refuse--the chance to sail beyond the fished-out waters on the Hokkaido side of the Notsuke Channel. With assurances of a 51% Soviet-owned joint venture to trade in seafood and operate a fish farm, the small fleet operated by his Utari Fishing Cooperative laid a net and planted six tons of sea bass in the forbidden seabed off Kunashiri in July.

Shiiku justified the audacious enterprise on a historical basis: Kunashiri, like the rest of the Kuriles, Sakhalin and even Hokkaido itself, once belonged to the Ainu before Japanese settlers moved north and displaced them. He brushes aside the suggestion that he might have gullibly played into the hands of Soviet propaganda.

“If they’re going to say I betrayed my country, I can always come back with the argument that they should give Hokkaido back to the Ainu,” Shiiku said. “This all used to be ours.”

Scholars believe the Ainu were the original inhabitants of Japanese archipelago and were pushed north to Hokkaido by the more aggressive Yamato civilization that established the imperial line on the island of Honshu. Their numbers have been drastically reduced by a campaign of oppression and assimilation, and now only a few thousand people identify themselves as belonging to the ethnic group.

The Ainu, primitive fishermen and hunters, were passive bystanders when the Japanese shogunate bumped into Czarist Russia in the early 19th Century in the Kurile Islands and on Sakhalin.

Japan acquired sovereignty over the Northern Territories, with a border drawn between the islands of Etorofu and Urup, in an 1855 Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, and took all the Kuriles in exchange for rights to Sakhalin in 1875. The 1905 Portsmouth Treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War ceded the southern half of Sakhalin to Japan.

No Russian ever lived in the Northern Territories until August, 1945. When the Red Army soldiers arrived, there were about 17,000 Japanese villagers on the islands. They were eventually all relocated to the main Japanese islands.

Mitsuo Yanami, 60, a furniture retailer in the Hokkaido fishing port of Nemuro, recalls the confusion of the day Soviet troops came to secure his tiny island of Taraku, in the Habomai group.

“They were the first foreigners I ever saw in my life, and I thought they were American soldiers at first,” Yanami said. “It seemed odd that they kept talking about Stalin.”

Yanami, then 17, escaped during the night two months later in a rowboat towed by a fishing trawler, as soldiers fired automatic rifles at him and his family. He has been back only once in 43 years, on a graveside visit that Soviet authorities allowed in 1974. The village was gone.

“I started weeping,” Yanami said. “My head was completely empty. All I knew was that I was crying. I picked up some rocks to take back, because there was nothing else left. Those rocks are worth more to me now than diamonds.”

In coastal towns with large refugee populations like Nemuro and Shibetsu, regaining the islands has been institutionalized as a holy crusade. Banners and billboards everywhere demand their return, and even traffic safety signs in Nemuro carry slogans about the Northern Territories.

The cause has been enshrined in a $20-million observation tower and museum erected on Cape Nosappu by Ryoichi Sasakawa, a war crimes suspect and self-proclaimed fascist who made a fortune in gambling. Every summer, right-wing extremists make the pilgrimage to the cape, along with hordes of ordinary tourists.

But beneath the surface, many local people are weighing political principles against economic realities. Since the 200-mile territorial rule was enacted in 1977, sharply curtailing Japanese fishing rights in Nemuro Bay, there has been increasing support for a compromise solution, such as accepting Shikotan and the Habomais while abandoning claim to Kunashiri and Etorofu, the large islands.

“People are beginning to feel a real conflict,” said a journalist based in Nemuro for a national daily. “They are struggling with this in their daily lives.”

At the same time, some observers believe that the most conservative elements in Japan’s power structure do not want to see the problem resolved, even with the return of all the islands, because to do so would remove the last obstacle to reconciliation with their ancestral enemy to the north and weaken Japan’s vigilance against the Soviet threat.

“It’s not as though everybody wants the islands returned--or else,” said Hakamada, the Soviet specialist. “A lot of people want to use the issue out front as political leverage, and some would really be upset if they (the islands) were actually returned. The right wing would lose its cause celebre. “