Lines in the Snow: Imagining the Russo-Japanese Frontier

Abstract

J N that web of intersecting tragedies which we call Second World one of the most curious conflicts was surely the three-week war between the Soviet Union andJapan, which broke out on 8 August 1945, and ended several days afterJapan's official surrender to the allied powers. Perhaps the shortest of the many wars within the War, it has created the most prolonged and intractable search for peace. Today, more that fifty years after the event, the Japanese and Russian governments are still locked in unresolved discussions about a peace treaty which they now, under terms of the 1997 'Yeltsin-Hashimoto Plan, hope to sign sometime before the end of the year 2000. Their main stumbling block has been conflict over the Russo-Japanese frontier: specifically over Japan's claims to the islands of Shikotan, Kunashir, Iturup and the Habomai group, seized by Soviet troops (along with the rest of the Kurile island chain and the southern half of Sakhalin) during those two weeks of fighting in August 1945; a few rocky dots in the ocean with a total population of about twenty thousand. As in many border disputes, even the place names are bones of contention. The Russian government calls these islands the Southern Kuriles, while the Japanese state denies that they are part of the Kurile archipelago, and refers to the region as the Northern Territories (Hopp6 Ry6do) .1 What fascinates me about this story is not so much the glacially slow progress of international diplomacy, but rather the nature of the frontier itself: the arbitrary, moveable line which separates Russia from Japan, and which now runs between Hokkaido to the south and the islands of Habomai, Kunashir and Sakhalin to the north. Crossing one part of this line in the summer of 1996, on the rusting ferry which connects the northernmost Japanese city of Wakkanai with the Russian island of Sakhalin, I sat next to a man who has lived all his life in a house overlooking Wakkanai harbour. Every clear day he looks out of his bedroom window at the dark line of the Sakhalin coast on the horizon. But for the first thirty years of his life it was as inaccessible as the moon. Now he was going to set foot on it for the first time. This is not simply a border between nation and nation. Across the water, as guidebooks inform the small trickle ofJapanese tourists who make this