Internal and External Risks to Japan’s Northern Territories Policy

On 8 August 1945 the Soviet Union abrogated the Neutrality Pact it had signed with Japan four years previously and declared war on Japan. Throughout the rest of the month of August it invaded Manchuria and occupied a chain of islands stretching south from Kamchatka. The army hopped from island to island, continuing its operations weeks after Japan formally surrendered, and only stopping when it reached sight of Hokkaido, the most northerly of the home islands, in September.

The reason the invasion proceeded despite the Japanese surrender was simple: at the Yalta Conference early that year, Stalin was promised the Kurile Islands as a quid pro quo for entering the Pacific War. Indeed Article 2(c) of the San Francisco Peace Treaty states that ‘Japan renounces all right, title and claim to the Kurile Islands’ (San Francisco Peace Treaty 1951). Today Russia has inherited Soviet sovereignty over the islands, which Japan disputes insisting that the southernmost four – referred to by Russia as the Southern Kuriles – are not part of the Kurile Chain and in fact pertain to Hokkaido.

In Japan the islands are known as Hoppō Ryōdo, or Northern Territories, and Tokyo claims that they are both legally and historically Japanese territory.1