Although it has already been 75 years since World War II ended, when the territorial divisions that now demarcate various parts of the world were drawn through a series of international treaties and laws, politicians in a number of countries continue to exploit territorial issues in order to maintain military tensions, to justify increases in military spending, and as an argument to support nationalist views that only serve to deepen the divide in relations between a number of countries.
A prime example of this would be Japan’s policy over the last few decades, where the country’s ruling elite has been stoking territorial claims and nationalism in an attempt to strengthen its power. To this end, Japan has now ramped up its rhetoric in the country’s territorial dispute with Russia over some of the Kuril Islands, and in the Liancourt Rocks dispute with South Korea (known as the “Dokdo” Islands in Korean and the “Takeshima” Islands in Japanese), while the stumbling block in relations between Japan and China has been the southernmost strategically important island of Okinotori in the Philippine Sea, as well as the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. Added to this list is Japan’s territorial claim to part of Antarctica located between the Ross Dependency and the Falkland Islands Dependencies.
Through these territorial disputes, Japan is claiming the oil and gas resources that all of these islands could offer, and seeking control of the transport and economic ties between Russia, China, North Korea and South Korea in the Pacific Basin.
Several decades may have passed, but people in Japan have not forgotten how they lost more than 600 islands in the Pacific Ocean, captured by the United States! After 1945, Japan was deprived of the Mariana Islands, the Marshall Islands, the Carolines, and the Palau Islands (in the Western and Central Pacific), which had all been ceded to Japan in 1919 under the South Seas League of Nations mandate. The total area of these islands amounts to almost half of the entire territory of the Pacific Basin! Who gained this territory? The United States did in 1947. The United States received the islands under the terms of a United Nations trusteeship agreement, but they were declared the so-called “Federated States of Micronesia” by Washington in 1986. Neither the Japanese government nor even Japanese nationalist groups dare recall this as the greatest loss in national memory. There is a fairly understandable reason for this. The importance of Japan’s military and political alliance with the United States stretching back to the 1950s, and the numerous American military bases in Japan outweigh Japan’s territorial claims. Especially considering that the US backs Tokyo’s claims to the Russian, Chinese and Korean territories. Japan’s preoccupation with the captured territories is therefore little more than an opportunistic policy towards a number of countries, which the United States is exempt from…
In order to back up its territorial claims with military muscle, Japan has been actively strengthening the Ministry of Defense and the Japan Self-Defense Forces over recent years. Then through the Defense Ministry and the army, Japan has been strengthening its defense capability along the borders of remote islands.
As a result, Japan now not only has territorial disputes with Russia, but with all its other neighboring states. For instance, the South Korean government has strongly objected to the Japan government officially claiming the Dokdo Islands which are administered by Seoul as Japanese territory in its “diplomatic blue book and defense white paper”, not to mention the island being marked as Japanese territory in school textbooks. The situation remains quite tense around the Diaoyu Islands (the Senkaku Islands), which were returned to Japan in 1971 under the Okinawa reversion deal and China now claims, citing historical documents and facts.
Kicking up a fuss over territorial disputes with neighboring states does nothing to unite people, it divides them, creates bad blood, and is fraught with risks of confrontation, including military confrontation.
Over the last century alone, Russia has fought in five wars and border conflicts with Japan over the country’s territorial claims: the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese Siberian Intervention, the Battle of Lake Khasan, the Battles of Khalkhin Gol, and World War II. In all of these Japanese military ventures, Tokyo suffered a crushing defeat. Japan has now resumed its military build-up in this region under the patronage of the United States, and is trying to conceal these actions. However, something like this is very difficult to hide in the world we live in today, with advanced reconnaissance satellite systems, radio intelligence, and with information simply being leaked using ordinary mobile phones.
Using this technology, Japanese submarines have been spotted near the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East on a frequent basis since April 2019, which had never been detected there before. No one would have said Japan is a country famous for its aircraft carriers, yet it managed to create an entire flotilla with four of its own warships without showing them off, taking careful steps to keep them out of the public eye: the JS Izumo, JS Kaga, JS Hyūga and JS Ise, which are not only well equipped to carry 20 aircraft and the necessary number of helicopters, but their decks have been slightly altered so that they can also accommodate 40 F-35B vertical takeoff stealth fighters, which were recently ordered from the United States.
After suffering defeat in World War II, the new Japan was prohibited from developing any nuclear weapons. Although there is no official information that would suggest Japan possesses any nuclear weapons, which are a distinctive sign that a country is operating a seriously strong military machine, many experts still believe that it would only take Japan one year to create them. Moreover, Japan has the necessary scientific and technical capabilities to do so, as well as a large stockpile of nuclear material. For instance, according to the Sohu Chinese web portal, Tokyo has already amassed enough processed plutonium to make 6000 nuclear bombs, and Japan has kept this hidden from its US allies and other countries for several years. It should be noted that this is around the same amount of nuclear warheads that Russia and the United States have, which experts estimate at 7000 and 6800, respectively, while France is estimated to have 300, China has 270, and North Korea has between 10 and 60 according to various estimates. At the same time, Sohu also points out that Tokyo has been enriching and refining enough raw materials within its nuclear power industry to manufacture nuclear weapons for several years. And although the Chinese news outlet does not specify exactly how much nuclear material they have, we are talking about at least tens of tons of separated plutonium. As far as nuclear delivery vehicles are concerned, we must not forget that Japan is a leading country in space technology. Japan landed a spacecraft on an asteroid, where a sample of the asteroid material was collected and then returned it to Earth, and Japanese launch vehicles are extremely reliable.
In short, Japan’s scientific and technical capabilities, along with the stockpile of plutonium reserves it has already accumulated mean that the country would be able to secretly produce, maintain and store nuclear weapons, while supercomputers could be deployed to simulate nuclear tests, and explosive testing would only need to be conducted if the political need to do so were to arise. We also must not forget that like Nazi Germany, Japan was already trying to create its own nuclear weapons during World War II.
For now at least, Tokyo is deploying an alternative weapon in its territorial disputes, tapping into nationalism among the Japanese population and into national memory, which includes leading information campaigns about indigenous Japanese people who allegedly lived on the territory near Japan for centuries, although it is now occupied by other countries.
The main theory used to back up claims to Russian territory is about the indigenous Ainu people. Yet the Japanese government has not met the demands that have been made by Ainu activists, who have called for Japanese legislation on Ainu fishing rights to be brought into full compliance with the provisions of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, in order to grant the ethnic minority the right to continue traditional fishing without restrictions such as having to request permission from the Japanese authorities. The Japanese government has only responded with half measures. During the last meeting on education, culture, sports, science and technology and scientific research in the House of Representatives (the lower house of the National Diet of Japan), members were introduced to the new head of the Hokkaido University Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies, Dr. Hirofumi Kato (a graduate of the Department of Russian at the Sapporo University Faculty of Foreign Languages, who then transferred to study archaeology). That is why even the opening of the largest center to promote Ainu history and culture in Japan — the Symbolic Space for Ethnic Harmony in Shiraoi, Hokkaido Prefecture — has been portrayed by the Japanese opposition as the Abe administration’s attempt to exploit Ainu culture and history for its own gain.
The southern Kuril Islands are deliberately referred to as the “Northern Territories” in Tokyo, and they will use any pretext to object to the judgement of the 1948 International Military Tribunal for the Far East. However, ardent supporters of this policy in Japan should be mindful that actively exploiting the Kuril Islands dispute and claiming the “Northern Territories” as their own may give rise to a dispute over “Southern Territories” from the Russian perspective. After all, it was the Russian Empire that took the Ainu under its protection with the 1855 Treaty of Shimoda, which it has not withdrawn from. The indigenous people of the southern Kuril Islands were also indigenous to northern Hokkaido, Japan’s second largest island, where they continue to live to this day. Russia therefore has good grounds to offer these people its protection again, as it did two hundred years ago, and claim rights to Hokkaido.
Valery Kulikov, political analyst, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
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