Анджела Стент - Putin's World - Russia Against the West and with the Rest

Excellent sushi, of course, cannot overcome history. The Japan-Russia relationship has for over a century been fraught and frosty. Ever since Japan defeated Russia in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, Russians have been wary of the Japanese—and the feeling is mutual. At the end of World War Two, the USSR occupied four islands that had previously been Japanese. Since then, Tokyo has insisted they must be returned, and Russia has refused to return them. Successive attempts to normalize relations have foundered on the islands in question. Today, facing a rising and more assertive China and a dangerous and unpredictable North Korea, the Japanese leadership is convinced that it is essential to improve ties with Russia. The Kremlin has responded favorably to Japan’s overtures. Yet Moscow may well continue to rebuff Tokyo’s proposals for territorial concessions. Might Japan be willing to renounce the islands? How might a genuine rapprochement between Russia and Japan alter the geopolitical landscape in Northeast Asia and beyond? This chapter will explore ties between a Japanese leader determined to make progress and his Russian counterpart whose devotion to Japanese martial arts has given him a unique perspective on this difficult relationship.

The twentieth century began with a shock for imperial Russia—whose population numbered 130 million at the time—when it was defeated by Japan, with a population of 46.5 million but with a superior navy and fleet. 4In February 1904, Japan launched a surprise torpedo attack on Russia’s Far Eastern Fleet in Port Arthur, Manchuria, leaving a cruiser and two battleships damaged. The attack was the culmination of tensions that had begun in the early 1890s. Russia had already occupied half of the then-Japanese island of Sakhalin in 1875. The tsarist empire was expanding eastward, and the 1904–1905 war was fought over control of railroad and port facilities in Manchuria and over the political domination of the Korean Peninsula, which until then had been under Chinese control. 5Japan had been willing to negotiate a spheres-of-influence agreement with Russia on the Korean Peninsula, but its efforts were rebuffed.

The Russians, who were militarily unprepared for this war, had seriously underestimated the Japanese. The Russian legation in Tokyo was sending back reports to Saint Petersburg that the “new model” Japanese conscript army was highly effective. But the Russian imperial court and the military brass discounted this information. They still viewed the Japanese as “little people who lived in paper houses and wasted hours on flower arrangements and tea ceremonies.” Ignorant of real Japanese military prowess, Tsar Nicholas and his courtiers referred to the Japanese as “monkeys” and their army as “infantile.” In fact, Japanese sailors were literate, while most Russian sailors were not, and most Japanese sailors had grown up on or near the coast, whereas most Russian sailors had not seen the sea until conscription. 6This was the first victory in modern times of an Asian power over a European empire.

The Russo-Japanese War was economically, politically, and militarily costly for both countries. Japan faced a payments crisis, and the public in Russia grew increasingly incensed by the toll the war was taking. Russia incurred 31,000 casualties and lost almost its entire Baltic and Far Eastern surface fleet after the decisive Battle of Tsushima. 7Japan lost 49,000 lives. Defeated by the Japanese, Russia signed a peace treaty with Japan in August 1905 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. President Theodore Roosevelt brokered the treaty, for which he received the Nobel Prize. Tsar Nicholas sent his top adviser, Count Sergei Witte, to negotiate, telling him he wouldn’t “pay a kopek or cede an inch of territory.” 8But that was not the case. Russia was forced to recognize Japan’s interest in Korea, which Japan annexed in 1910. Russia ceded to Japan the southern half of Sakhalin, together with Port Arthur and Dairen and extensive rights in Manchuria. 9Russia retained a sphere of influence in northern Manchuria and Outer Mongolia. Although Witte publicly praised Roosevelt’s gifts as a leader, his memoirs convey a different impression. He found the US president “selfish and totally without ideals,” a vulgar contrast to the “gentlemanly” Japanese. 10

Russia’s defeat by Japan also had a profound impact domestically. It precipitated the first act in a revolutionary movement that eventually led to the Bolshevik uprising a little more than a decade later. The peasants and workers had for some time harbored a number of serious economic and political grievances, but unrest caused by Russia’s faltering fortunes in the war exacerbated these problems and precipitated the first Russian revolution in 1905. On January 9, a crowd of peaceful demonstrators gathered outside the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to protest their privations. Military units fired on them, killing and wounding more than a thousand. “Bloody Sunday,” as it came to be known, led the tsar to introduce limited political reforms and establish for the first time a legislative assembly with limited suffrage: the State Duma. Vladimir Lenin called this 1905 revolution the Great Rehearsal for the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917.

Russo-Japanese relations improved after the war’s end, only to deteriorate after the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917. Faced with the collapse of state authority in Russia’s Far East and suspicious of the Bolsheviks, Japan intervened militarily in Russia’s civil war that followed the revolution. At the height of their intervention, 70,000 Japanese troops were deployed across the Russian Far East. Japan supported the anti-Bolshevik White Army—especially its forces deployed in Siberia. But once the Red Army had defeated its White opponents, the Japanese began to negotiate with the new Soviet government, and in 1925 a treaty of recognition was signed, with the Soviets accepting the terms of the 1905 Portsmouth treaty.

In the interwar period, relations between the USSR and Japan remained strained. Yet, unexpectedly, Stalin was able to reach an agreement with Japan that saved the USSR from a two-front war. In April 1941, Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka visited his allies in Berlin, and although he was given hints about the forthcoming German attack on the Soviet Union, Hitler said nothing about the need for Japan to move against the USSR as well. 11He then went to Moscow, where Stalin put on a charm offensive, greeting him as a fellow Asian. “You are Asiatic. So am I. We are all Asian.” 12Two months before Germany invaded the USSR, Moscow and Tokyo signed a five-year neutrality pact. Dubbed a “strange neutrality,” the pact would mean that two countries that would soon be fighting in opposing coalitions in a world war nevertheless refrained from attacking each other. The nonaggression pact with Japan was a great coup for Stalin’s diplomacy. Stalin was seemingly unaware that within weeks Hitler was to launch Operation Barbarossa and invade the USSR—with which Germany had signed a nonaggression pact two years earlier. 13But Japan and the USSR observed the neutrality pact for four years—until the victorious Soviet Union broke the pact, invaded Manchuria in August 1945, and reoccupied Sakhalin and the Southern Kuril Islands. Thus the stalemate that persists today.

Russians call them the Kuril Islands. Japanese call them the Northern Territories. The disputed volcanic islands covering 5,000 square kilometers are literally and figuratively shrouded in mists for much of the year. A Russian sea captain who approached the islands in 1811 complained of the “excessively thick fogs.” 14Nevertheless, “these unattractive pieces of real estate carry symbolic associations that matter a great deal to many.” 15In the late eighteenth century, a Russian naval expedition reached the Kuril Islands with their Japanese inhabitants, but Russia and Japan had yet to demarcate borders in the Sea of Okhotsk. Eventually, in the 1875 Treaty of Saint Petersburg, Japan gave up its rights in Sakhalin in exchange for sovereignty over all of the Kuril Islands. At this point both Russians and Japanese lived on the islands, and their respective rights were guaranteed. But ambiguity over the territorial demarcation of these islands persisted, and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov unsuccessfully tried to have them returned to the USSR as part of the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact.