Pinpoint Islands Thrust a Long Knife Into Russo-Japanese Relations : With Yeltsin on the verge of a visit to Tokyo, disputed territory again looms as an obstacle to better ties.

Question: What is about as big as Delaware, home to far more crabs than human beings and the reason that two of the world’s most powerful countries are, at least in diplomats’ eyes, still fighting World War II?

Answer: Four small fog-bound islands off the north coast of Japan’s Hokkaido Island.

Typically, Russia and Japan can’t even agree about what to call them.

For the Japanese, the contested mini-archipelago is the “Northern Territories,” an integral part of Japan. For Russians, the isles are the “Southern Kurils,” a merited trophy for having defeated the Axis.

These rocky dots on the map, which total about 2,000 square miles and are home to 25,000 people, are the reason two nations that have gone to war twice in this century are still not friends. With Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin preparing for a Sept. 13-16 visit to Tokyo, the fate of the islands looms again as a potentially insurmountable obstacle to better Russian-Japanese ties.

Yeltsin has said that he is taking a dozen proposals to Japan to break the deadlock. Which one he finally decides upon will depend on what the Japanese offer in exchange--and on what Yeltsin thinks he can get away with at home.

For with all of this country’s immense problems, the fate of the islands--.02% of Russia’s immense territory--has been seized upon by members of the national legislature as a life-or-death matter. Some legislators obviously want to humiliate or cow Yeltsin, or prove they are more nationalistic or Russian than he; others worry about a repeat of the 1867 sale of Alaska to the United States that many Russians rue even today.

“This national pride of Russians is starved as never before,” warns Iona I. Andronov, deputy chairman of the Parliament’s International Affairs Committee. “A match is enough to inflame them. The Kurils could be that match.”

What is worse, say opponents of concessions to Japan, is that ceding the islands would trigger a chain reaction of territorial claims on Russia from other neighbors, including China, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia--even Finland and Germany.

A recent poll by one conservative newspaper found that 72.3% of Muscovites were opposed to selling or giving away the islands. The Russian military is also opposed: A July report from the general staff warned in the direst sort of Cold War rhetoric that Japanese troops on Hokkaido outnumber “11-to-1” the 7,000 Russian soldiers now in the Southern Kurils, whose role is supposedly “strictly defensive.”

How deeply Russians feel about bits of their territory that few can even name should become evident next Thursday, when the All-Union Committee for the Defense of the Kurils, a hastily assembled group of xenophobes and former Communists, has called for a country-wide demonstration.

And what does Yeltsin think? During the visit of Japanese Foreign Minister Michio Watanabe to Moscow this week, the Russian leader at one point conducted an impromptu poll of photographers and television crews at the Kremlin on whether he should “give away” the islands. Some said yes, others no.

“You see, opinions differ,” Yeltsin said. “Politically, it is not the time for Russia to do this now.”

Japanese hearts in the room sank.

Japan wants Moscow to recognize that all four islands--Shikotan, Kunashiri, Etorofu and the Habomai group--belong to Japan before they allow the large-scale Japanese assistance and investment that many Russians think is indispensable to develop Siberia.

In May, the Japanese stopped demanding the immediate return of the islands and began saying that a mere recognition of Tokyo’s sovereignty would be sufficient--with details on the land transfer to be worked out later.

“Those islands have never belonged to anyone except Japan. If Yeltsin can agree to that point, we can be flexible,” Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa said last Sunday.

As a tempting reward for the Russians, Miyazawa dangled “large-scale aid.” (No amount has been specified, but speculation has run into the billions of dollars.)

The islands themselves, an isolated outpost of Russian influence 4,700 miles from Moscow, are rich in seafood and gold ore but drearily underdeveloped. The average worker’s salary is the ruble equivalent of $15 a month. Many islanders cannot move because shipping their belongings to the mainland costs too much.

“People there are tired to death of the lawlessness, disorder, economic hardships and lack of attention from Russian authorities,” Father Gleb Yakunin, an Orthodox priest and progressive member of Russia’s legislature, said after a visit.

Rumors are sweeping the islands that the Japanese will pay each resident up to $300,000 if they agree to the islands’ transfer. On Shikotan, Yakunin reported, most people are ready to embrace Japanese rule, while most on the other islands want to remain Russian.

The ongoing dispute over territory has sparked a nastiness in Russo-Japanese ties that would be hard to imagine in, say, Moscow’s relations with Washington. The Russians think their fledgling experiment in free-market democracy is getting minimal support from Tokyo; in Japan, “the overwhelming opinion . . . is that Russia is taking an extremely tough stance,” said Koichi Fuwa, political editor at the Yomiuri newspaper.

Last month, Deputy Prime Minister Mikhail N. Poltoranin, who went to Tokyo to lay the groundwork for Yeltsin’s trip, said his boss would announce his support for an abortive 1956 accord, under which Moscow had agreed to return the two smaller islands, Shikotan and the Habomai group, in exchange for a formal Russo-Japanese peace treaty.

But Poltoranin, a longtime Yeltsin crony, cautioned that it would be politically too dicey for Yeltsin to hand over any of Russia’s land in the near future.

Is that still Yeltsin’s position? He declined to tell Watanabe and has said he will speak his mind only when he meets with Miyazawa in Tokyo.

Some Japanese, including a good part of the press, hope Yeltsin will produce a “trump card” as he did during his last trip to Washington, when he and President Bush agreed to a surprise pact on unprecedented reductions in strategic arms.

Until something like that happens, Russo-Japanese relations have turned chilly, even a bit nasty. When Yeltsin and Watanabe met Wednesday in the Kremlin, Yeltsin reportedly lashed out at “the pressure applied by Japan--economic, political and social, and even psychological.”

Even Yeltsin’s bodyguards have been allowed to get into the act, in what looks a lot like an officially sanctioned slap at the Japanese that is also supposed to raise doubts about whether the visit--the first by the leader of an independent Russia--will take place at all.

In a report leaked this week, Yeltsin’s security service complained that both right-wing and leftist protests could be anticipated in Tokyo, that the Japanese couldn’t give “full guarantees” for Yeltsin’s safety and that they were ordered by the Japanese not to bring their firearms. Unless the Japanese can be made to see reason, Yeltsin’s bodyguards said, the Tokyo visit might bring “moral and political damage to the young Russian state.”

A Long, Bitter Rivalry

The struggle between Russia and Japan in the Far East has been long and bitter, and relations between the former imperial rivals remain chilly , if correct , even now. Some key episodes:

1860--Russia acquires an outlet on the Sea of Japan; Japan at once adopts a more aggressive policy in China and Korea.

1895--Japan defeats China; Russia joins Britain, France and Germany to deprive Japan of territorial gains.

1891--The future Czar Nicholas II is attacked and wounded by would-be assassin during first visit by a Romanov to Japan.

1905--Russo-Japanese War begins when Japanese, without declaration of war, attack Russian naval base at Port Arthur in northern China. Russian land, naval forces are defeated, and the defeat helps precipitate the 1905 Russian revolution.

1945--Three days after atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, the Soviet Union enters the war against Japan. Now-disputed islands are seized by Red Army after Japan surrenders, and their 17,000 inhabitants are deported, Japan charges.

1956--Russia offers Tokyo government two southernmost and smallest islands, Shikotan and Habomai group, if peace treaty with Moscow is signed. Offer withdrawn when Japan, United States conclude security alliance.

1991--Mikhail S. Gorbachev, first Soviet leader to visit Tokyo, fails to achieve breakthrough on territorial issue.

Times staff writer Teresa Watanabe contributed to this report from Tokyo.