50 Years from San Francisco: Re-Examining the Peace Treaty and Japan's Territorial Problems

Abstract

In September 1951, against the background of the escalating cold in Asia,Japan signed a peace treaty with forty-eight countries and returned to the international community as a member of the Western bloc. A half-century has passed since then and one decade has passed since the of the U.S.-USSR cold war, the collapse of the Yalta System and the beginning of the so-called post-cold war era. However, except for the demise of the Soviet Union, the international political environment surroundingJapan in the Asia-Pacific is not greatly different the cold era.2 The emergence of the cold was a process in which the nature of SovietU.S. relations altered cooperation to confrontation and, in terms of the Asia-Pacific international order, the Yalta blueprint became distorted and transformed into the San Francisco System. In Europe, the U.S.-U.K.USSR Yalta Agreement of February 1945 became the basis of the cold structure. After it went through a series of East-West tensions, such as the communization of Eastern Europe and the division of Germany, the Yalta System was consolidated and received international recognition as the status quo in the 1973 Helsinki Agreement. But by the early 1990s the Yalta System had collapsed, accompanied by democratization of Eastern Europe, demolition of the Berlin Wall, achievement of independence by the Baltic states, reunification of Germany, and the demise of the Soviet Union. In December 1989, when Presidents Gorbachev and Bush released the end of the cold war declaration in Malta, the expression from Yalta to Malta was often employed in the mass media as symbolizing the advent of a new era.