Soviet Stand on Japan Isles Seems Eased

Soviet Foreign Minister Alexander A. Bessmertnykh described as shortsighted his country’s past refusal to negotiate with Japan over its claims to four small islands occupied by the Soviet Union off Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost main island. The dispute has marred the two countries’ relations since World War II.

“We cannot hide our head in the sand like an ostrich and ignore the existence of the problem,” Bessmertnykh said at a news conference Saturday after a day of meetings with Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Nakayama and with Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu.

But Japanese officials said that Bessmertnykh, who spent three days here to pave the way for President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s visit in mid-April, offered no specific proposals that might help break the deadlock.

“I would have hoped some concrete sign would have emerged, taking into consideration the visit is in two weeks’ time,” a Japanese Foreign Ministry official said.

The dispute centers on the four southernmost islands of the Kurils, a chain extending north from Japan to the Soviet Union’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The Soviet Union maintains that it received the islands--Habomai, Shikotan, Kunashiri and Etorofu--as part of the Yalta agreement of World War II. Japan did not participate in the Yalta talks conducted by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin.

Japan says treaties with czarist Russia excluded the islands from the Kurils and gave them to Japan. It has long demanded that they be returned and that a formal peace treaty be signed by the two World War II enemies before Tokyo can undertake full-scale economic ties with the Soviet Union.

Japanese newspapers reported earlier last week that Japan was prepared to offer the Soviet Union $28 billion in economic assistance, including $8 billion in private sector financing, if it would agree to return two of the four islands and recognize Japanese sovereignty over the other two.

There have been reports that Gorbachev would be willing to agree to the terms of a 1956 joint declaration in which the Soviet Union offered to give two of the islands back to Japan.

None of these proposals came up in talks between the two foreign ministers last week, Japanese Foreign Ministry officials said.

Instead, both sides hammered out 15 agreements on such issues as coastal trade and air traffic.

Officials said the Soviet side was also markedly more open and less tied to the rigid polemics that characterized past Soviet negotiations on the territorial issue.

Gorbachev has repeatedly expressed a desire for Japanese help in boosting the Soviet economy with such projects as converting weapons factories into consumer products plants. But analysts say that Gorbachev would have difficulty giving up the islands since hard-liners in his government and in the armed forces strongly oppose territorial concessions.