Gorbachev Lands in Japan With Aid, Trade in Mind

With the Soviet economy in chaos and his own political position increasingly precarious, Mikhail S. Gorbachev began a historic visit to Japan today with the aim of winning billions of dollars in desperately needed aid and trade to prop up the crumbling Soviet state.

For the Japanese, the overriding concern is whether the Soviet president, in order to ensure himself such assistance, will give ground in a rancorous territorial quarrel that has embittered relations between Japan and the Soviet Union for 45 years.

With the 10:30 a.m. touchdown of the 60-year-old Gorbachev’s Ilyushin-62 jet at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, he became the first Kremlin leader in history to visit Japan. It was the first time the beleaguered head of state has felt it possible to leave home since mid-November.

Mounting domestic turmoil--now embodied in a six-week-old coal miners’ strike, consumer anger over government-imposed price increases and secessionist ferment in the Transcaucasian republic of Georgia--even kept Gorbachev from traveling to Norway to receive the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize last December.

Three howitzers boomed a 21-gun salute as Gorbachev emerged from the presidential airliner. With his wife Raisa, Gorbachev was whisked in a bulletproof 5.7-ton Zil limousine flown in earlier to the ginkgo-shaded grounds of Akasaka Palace, which will be the Soviet couple’s official residence during their four-day stay.

Inside the glittering white granite building, Gorbachev was greeted by his protocol host, Emperor Akihito. They clasped hands and chatted with the aid of an interpreter, then strolled outside to stand on a red carpet as a military band played the Soviet and Japanese anthems.

Gorbachev will begin the first of three rounds of talks with Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu this afternoon. He is accompanied by Foreign Minister Alexander A. Bessmertnykh, longtime adviser Alexander N. Yakovlev and a large delegation that includes representatives of his political nemesis, Boris N. Yeltsin.

Gorbachev’s visit opens a new chapter in relations between two countries that have been at war five times this century. The security precautions taken in Toyko--as tight as during Akihito’s enthronement in December following the death of his father, Hirohito--highlighted the hostility some Japanese still feel toward their great neighbor and its leader.

Tokyo police mobilized a force of 21,000 to protect Gorbachev.

Other Japanese, however, expressed delight that Gorbachev, now in his seventh year in power, is finally visiting their capital.

“He’s very charismatic; he’s the top leader,” one young career woman interviewed in Tokyo’s banking district said. “No one else even comes close.”

Kaifu declared earlier that Gorbachev’s visit, contemplated since 1986 and postponed at least once, marks nothing less than “the beginning of Soviet-Japanese relations.”

One of the centerpieces of Gorbachev’s visit will be the address on security and cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region he is scheduled to deliver Wednesday to Japan’s Parliament. The speech is expected to present a blueprint for security and confidence-building measures akin to those already at work in Europe.

The new Kremlin sensitivity to the security concerns of its Asian neighbors was evident even before Gorbachev’s arrival. His spokesman, Vitaly N. Ignatenko, announced to reporters Monday that the Kremlin would stop supplying fuel to a North Korean nuclear facility if the Pyongyang government does not allow inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Japan has made North Korean acceptance of international inspections a prerequisite for establishing diplomatic relations.

Without a doubt, the most crucial item in the Tokyo talks will be the fate of four small islands seized by the Red Army from the Japanese at the end of World War II and occupied by the Soviets since.

In an interview with a Japanese television company last week, Gorbachev cautioned that only a “step-by-step” approach would resolve the dispute over Shikotan, Kunashiri, Etorofu and the Habomai group of islets off Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido.

The feud over the islands, which is part of the chain commonly known as the Kurils but which Japan calls its Northern Territories, has prevented Japan from consenting to a formal peace treaty with the Soviets.

Members of Gorbachev’s entourage said the goal in the Tokyo negotiations is to demonstrate enough goodwill on the issue to stimulate far greater Japanese investment and trade.

“There are all these hopes that this trip will pay for itself, that it will promote a lot of investment,” a source close to Gorbachev said. The Tokyo talks will be a success “if the Japanese government decides to guarantee the investments that some (Japanese) companies have said they are willing to make,” the source said.

Japanese press accounts have put at up to $28 billion the economic assistance, including government-guaranteed credits, that Japan is willing to grant over a 10-year period in return for getting back all four islands.

One of the architects of Soviet policy toward Japan, Konstantin O. Sarkisov, deputy director of Moscow’s prestigious Institute of Oriental Studies, has recommended that Gorbachev and Kaifu return to a 1956 agreement, annulled by the Soviets four years later, that would have granted Japan the two smaller islands, Shikotan and the Habomai group, after the signing of a peace treaty.

“This would be the starting point, not the end point, of negotiations,” said Sarkisov, who is a member of the Soviet delegation in Tokyo.

However, even that arrangement would be fiercely opposed by Soviet hard-liners. Valentin Fedorov, chairman of the regional government on Sahkalin Island, said Monday that if Gorbachev announces he is giving back the islands, he will be swept from power.

Gorbachev is also under fire from radicals on this issue. Three officials of the Russian government, which Yeltsin heads, have been included in Gorbachev’s delegation to protect the interests of the Russian Federation, which has jurisdiction over the islands.

In a sense, Gorbachev began paying his respects to Japanese sensibilities before even arriving in Japan, stopping off in the industrial city of Khabarovsk Monday for a wreath-laying ceremony in memory of an estimated 60,000 Japanese prisoners of war who died in harsh conditions of imprisonment in the Soviet Far East after World War II. Before Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the very existence of the POWs was a taboo topic in the Soviet Union.

“Vremya,” the nightly news program on Soviet state television, broadcast scenes of several casual meetings he had with people on the streets of Khabarovsk.

In one crowd he addressed the question that was on everyone’s mind: What does he intend to do about the Kuril Islands?

“I’m going to Japan, as you know,” he told the crowd. “Everybody is asking me how many islands I will give away.”

A woman in the crowd spoke up and said, “I think not one.”

Gorbachev responded: “I do not have a different opinion (than you do), and I know your opinion.”

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren in Moscow contributed to this report.

DISPUTED ISLANDS

The Soviets and Japanese disagree even on what to call these dabs of land, totaling nearly 2,000 square miles, at the end of the Kuril chain. The islands arc through prime fishing and crabbing waters from Kamchatka to the home islands of Japan. Mapped by Russian explorers in 1711-13, the cold, rainy islets of Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan and the Habomai group were occupied by the aboriginal Ainu when Japanese shoguns collided with czarist Russia in the 19th Century. Japan acquired sovereignty in the 1855 Treaty of Commerce and Navigation with Russia, then took all 50-odd Kurils in 1875 in exchange for rights to coal- and iron-rich Sakhalin. In the 1905 Portsmouth Treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War, Tokyo kept the Kurils and regained southern Sakhalin. Those lands were returned to the Soviets in 1945 at the Yalta Conference, at which Japan was not a participant. The civilian Japanese population was then deported by the Soviets; Russian settlement is in its third generation. Tokyo claims the four southern islands are not part of the Kurils but are Japan’s Northern Territories. But in a non-binding referendum last month, 80% voted to stay in the Soviet Union. Island life is crude, with many people still residing in tar-paper shacks or wooden barracks. Fishing and seafood processing are the only viable economic activity; the desolate islands are thought to have untapped deposits of gold, sulfur, titanium and other resources.