An Uneasy Marriage Between Territorial Sovereignty and the Cold War: Unconditional Surrender and Japan's Search for a Uniform Perception of the San Francisco Peace Treaty

Abstract

The United States originally did not specify the extent of “unconditional surrender” to mean only Japan’s military surrender or a full occupation of the country by Allied forces to contain the spread of Communism in East Asia and the Pacific. Japan’s two different uses of the SFPT—as a historical evidence of territorial sovereignty regarding Dokdo and a negation of that very identity regarding the Kuriles—is a symptom of the ambiguity behind “unconditional surrender.” Japan can enhance its positional clarity in the disputes by providing a precise definition of “unconditional surrender” and ascertaining the SFPT’s relevance to this objective. Japan can accordingly assign the SFPT a singular identity as a historical evidence of territorial sovereignty or an official instrument dictating terms of Japan’s surrender, whereby territorial concessions can better be understood as tools to dismantle Japanese imperialism.