Tokyo should insist that the entire Kuril archipelago is “original Japanese territory,” said opposition leader Communist Party of Japan Kazuo Shii in an interview with Yomiuri.

According to the politician, the terms of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed by the authorities of the Land of the Rising Sun after the defeat in the Second World War, were unfair, since they assumed the renunciation of the rights to the Kuril Islands by Japan.

According to Kazuo Shii, the country can get the islands of the southern part of the archipelago, if it begins to make claims to its northern part.

Recall that the Communist Party of Japan was founded in 1922, and if at first its goal was to proclaim a socialist revolution in Japan, then later it began to insist on bourgeois-democratic.

  • Head of the opposition Communist Party of Japan, Kazuo Shii
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  • © Natsuki Sakai / AFLO

Until the end of World War II, the CPJ existed in an underground position, and its members were persecuted by the authorities. After the surrender of Japan, the party went out of the shadow for several years, but soon began to be subjected to repression by the occupying American administration.

However, the CPJ managed to survive these difficult periods, proclaim a course on the use of "peaceful opportunities for the development of the revolutionary process" and gain popularity in the country by the mid-1980s. So, in the 2005 elections, about 7.5% of voters who participated in the elections voted for the Communists. Today the party has about 400 thousand people in its ranks. It is worth noting that the CPJ criticizes not only the Soviet Union, which, according to the Japanese Communists, has moved away from the ideas of socialism towards the end of its existence, but also the States that subjugated Japan and pursue a hegemonic policy.

In addition, it has been the CPJ over the past few years that has been one of the key political forces insisting that Tokyo should demand "return" from Moscow to all the islands of the Kuril ridge, experts say.

The hard way to a peace treaty

Russia's rights to the islands were enshrined in the 1945 Yalta Agreement. By signing the Act of Unconditional Surrender in September 1945, Japan accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, which included the transfer of the islands to the Soviet Union.

At the same time, after the end of World War II, a peace treaty was not signed between Japan and the USSR, although in 1956 the countries signed a declaration under which a phased development of relations and the conclusion of a peace treaty were supposed.

Earlier, in 1951, Tokyo signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty, which enshrined Japan’s loss of rights to the Kuril Islands, as well as that part of Sakhalin Island, which was acquired by the Japanese side under the terms of the Portsmouth Treaty in 1905. However, the USSR did not begin to sign the San Francisco Peace Treaty, since the document did not specify the issue of the withdrawal of foreign troops from Japan, and did not specify in whose favor Tokyo renounced the island territories.

  • Shigeru Yoshida Signs San Francisco Peace Treaty
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  • © Treaty of San Francisco.

Today, official Tokyo insists that the sovereignty of Japan should extend to the islands of Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan and Habomai, which are part of the Russian Federation. At the same time, the Japanese side refers to the terms of the Shimodsk treaty of 1855, according to which Russia ceded to the Japanese side of the Kuril Islands in exchange for trade preferences. However, legally, this agreement has long ceased to be in force.

Moscow and Tokyo returned to the question of signing a peace treaty after the collapse of the USSR. In 2001, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister (at that time Yoshiro Mori. - RT ) adopted a joint statement in which they agreed to further negotiations on a peace treaty by “resolving the issue of the ownership of the Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan Islands and Habomai "in order to achieve" full normalization of bilateral relations. "

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  • © Sergey Guneev

However, the efforts of the parties have not yet yielded tangible results - differences in the positions of Tokyo and Moscow impede the signing of a peace treaty. As a possible compromise and prologue to the signing of the peace treaty, Tokyo and Moscow agreed in 2016 to begin joint economic activities on the islands.

In June 2017, the Japanese business delegation arrived in the Kuril Islands for the first time in history. At the same time, the Japanese side began to insist that the economic activity of Japanese companies in the Kuril Islands should be regulated by the norms of Japanese law, which is unacceptable for Russia. According to experts, in practice this would mean granting the Japanese extraterritorial status to the Japanese sovereign territory, which contradicts the basic law of the Russian Federation.

Conducting an active dialogue with Moscow on the possibility of signing a peace treaty, the Japanese side does not forget to recall its claims to the Kuril Islands.

So, the Russian side was puzzled by the map of the Olympic flame route, posted in August on the official website of the Summer Olympic Games, which will be held in Tokyo in 2020. On the map, the islands of Kunashir, Shikotan, Iturup and Habomai were designated as part of the Japanese prefecture of Hokkaido.

As stated then, the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, such actions by the Japanese side are unauthorized.

In addition, in August 2019, Secretary General of the Cabinet of Japan Yoshihide Suga through diplomatic channels protested to Moscow over the exercises in the Kunashir island, adding that the buildup of the Russian military there does not correspond to the position of Tokyo.

In response, the Russian Foreign Ministry invited the Japanese ambassador to Russia, Toyohis Kodzuki, for a conversation. Turning to a Japanese diplomat, Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov "drew attention to the unacceptability of Tokyo's" protests "in connection with the actions of the Russian Federation on its sovereign territory."

However, in September, Tokyo announced its intention to give Moscow a performance after Russian leader Vladimir Putin gave a symbolic start to the work of a fish processing plant on the island of Shikotan. This was announced by the Secretary General of the Government of Japan, Yoshihide Suga.

In response to these plans, the Russian embassy in Japan stated that it considers the submission of the Japanese side to be unacceptable.

“The South Kuril Islands belong to Russia legally following the results of the Second World War. Accordingly, the Russian side has the right to take any measures for the social development of its territories, ”the diplomatic mission said. As a result, no representation of the Japanese government to the Russian side was made.

"There is nothing new"

Tokyo's territorial claims on the Kuril Islands enjoy widespread support in Japanese society. Today, the Japanese government plans to seek the dissemination of Japanese sovereignty on the basis of the draft Soviet-Japanese declaration of 1956, according to which Moscow agreed to transfer to the Japanese side of the two islands - Habomai and Shikotan - on the condition that their actual transfer will be made after the conclusion of a peace treaty between the USSR and Japan.

The discussion of these conditions was interrupted by the USSR after Tokyo went to sign an agreement with Washington in 1960, according to which the US bases were given the right to use military bases on Japanese territory.

As the head of the MGIMO diplomacy department Alexander Panov noted in an interview with RT, Shinzo Abe’s government now believes that it can agree with Moscow to return to the conditions of the Soviet-Japanese agreements in 1956 so that the two islands of the Kuril ridge depart to Japan.

“If this does not succeed, then Japan will begin to demand from Russia all four South Kuril islands, which may lead to a complication of Russian-Japanese relations,” the expert explained.

According to Alexander Panov, demanding the "return" of the island, Japanese politicians are actually trying to refute the provisions of the Yalta and Potsdam declarations.

“With regard to the statements of the head of the CPJ, there is nothing new in them, this is a manifestation of political populism, since the party is guided by mass sentiments. Japanese public opinion has established the idea of ​​the need to demand the return of the islands, ”said the expert.

A similar point of view is shared by Pyotr Tsvetov, assistant professor of international relations at the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. According to the expert, the statement of the leader of the Japanese Communist Party contains elements of nationalist rhetoric. But the demands to return Japan to the "northern territories" (as the South Kuril Islands are called in Japan - RT .) Are heard not only by the CPJ representatives - not a single local politician, if he counts on the support of the Japanese electorate, can reject these ideas.

The fact is that about 90% of the Japanese are convinced that the victorious powers have acted unfairly towards Japan in the Second World War, explained Peter Tsvetov.

“The leader of the Japanese Communists, Kazuo Shii, speaks in the tradition of his party, which has always raised the question of the“ return ”of the islands. In fact, all Japanese politicians and parties are forced to broadcast this position, otherwise they risk being accused of “betraying” national interests, ”the expert summed up.