[ed. See also: The Shape of Japan to Come.]
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Mr. Hasegawa, a fisherman. “I don’t think that the bombing of Hiroshima was a good thing.” Staring at the furious grey channel where the Pacific Ocean meets the Sea of Okhotsk off Hokkaido in northern Japan on a cold, clear day last March, he spoke like a trauma victim reliving the past: “But if the Americans had dropped the atomic bomb a month earlier, those islands out there would still be Japan’s.”
Were I unaware of the chronology of the summer of 1945 and had we been anywhere else, such a comment would make the engaging 64-year-old seem insensitive or odd. Yet on the horizon three miles in the distance were the snow-covered banks of one of Russia’s Kuril Islands, known to the Japanese who lived there until 1945 as Suishojima of the Habomai group. Mr. Hasegawa’s father was among the 17,291 Japanese who called it and several other nearby islands home. Admiral Yamamoto gathered his fleet there in 1941 to attack Pearl Harbor, and the region was once one of the three richest fishing grounds in the world, replete with salmon, herring, and cod.
In August 1945 wartime Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s cataclysmic losses following America’s nuclear decimation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, its firebombing of most other cities, and its devastation of Okinawa island in the East China Sea. Equally important, Russia had disavowed its neutrality pact with Japan, and Soviet troops were advancing into Japanese-controlled Manchuria, northern Korea, and a number of islands around Hokkaido. As the emperor told his defeated subjects with staggering understatement, “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
What parts of its massive empire Japan would forfeit were then unknown. In the coming years, an area that once resembled an enormous octopus spanning North China and the southern Pacific near Australia would be reduced to the seahorse-shaped nation that we are now familiar with. But this reality has yet to be accepted fully in Japan, especially among people like Mr. Hasegawa, whose lives were upended by history. They were left to imagine any number of alternate realities.
On September 2, 1945, Hirohito’s representatives signed surrender papers to American officers aboard the USS Missouri. At the same moment, Soviet soldiers overwhelmed the islands that the Japanese continue to call the Northern Territories (yet which are known internationally as the southern part of Russia’s Kuril Island chain). At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Franklin Roosevelt promised these islands to Joseph Stalin in exchange for his troops’ entry into the war on the side of Allies. Within three days of the soldiers’ arrival on the southern Kurils, the Russians began to deport most of the Japanese to Hokkaido, although some were also taken to POW camps in Siberia. 20,000 Russians live on these islands today, and that, to paraphrase Vladimir Putin’s current mood, would appear to be that. Except, of course, for the evicted islanders and their descendants.
The peace treaty that ended war between Japan and the Allied Powers was signed in San Francisco in September 1951 and came into effect the following April. It dismantled Japan’s vast empire, returning the country largely to the shape it was in 1869, the year that Hokkaido became part of it. Whatever detractors say today, at the time Emperor Hirohito was pleased. On April 26, 1952, General Matthew Ridgway sent a telegram from Tokyo to the treaty’s chief architect in Washington, John Foster Dulles: “His Majesty the Emperor of Japan, on his own initiative, graciously called upon me this morning and personally expressed his gratitude … [for] making it possible for Japan to regain her sovereignty next Monday.” (...)
The internationally accepted map of Japan today dates from this moment in the early 1950s. The American negotiators involved in its creation excluded specific mention of the islands at the heart of each of Japan’s territorial disputes with Russia, China and Taiwan, and Korea. President Harry Truman’s special representative to the treaty process, John Foster Dulles, kept abundant correspondence, and his records along with those of other diplomats make clear that the final map would not fully commit to naming who owned what—for reasons ranging from real and perceived threats of Communist takeover of the entire area, including Japan, to a desire to cement the need for American power in the region. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was displeased with this gamble, especially in terms of the islands Japan contests with Russia. On January 17, 1952, Senator Tom Connally wrote to Dulles that the formula was “vague and contained the germ of future conflicting claims.”
Over sixty years later, that germ has developed and spread: in addition to the conflict with Russia, there is the perilous standoff in the East China Sea over several steep crags known to the Japanese as the Senkaku and to the Chinese and Taiwanese as the Diaoyutai, and the caustic on-again, off-again slugfest with Korea over some rocks in the sea that the Japanese call Takeshima and the Koreans, Dokdo. (...)
In 2012 Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami criticized all sides in the dispute for getting people “drunk” on nationalism’s “cheap liquor.” At the time, the Japanese government had just upped the ante by purchasing the islands for $26 million from the family that had held them privately for decades. The already tense situation erupted into widespread anti-Japanese protests and boycotts throughout China, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in trade loss, and leading to Japanese, Chinese, and American warships patrolling the area. Following months of frigid relations, China declared an “Air Defense Identification Zone” in the skies above the islands in November 2013, matching what Japan had maintained for decades but generating new outrage because Beijing dictated its position unilaterally and issued unusually expansive demands. (...)
In 1945 the United States captured these islands in the Battle for Okinawa—known locally as the “Typhoon of Steel”—and then governed them together with the rest of Okinawa, its pilots using them for target practice. When Washington agreed to Okinawa’s sovereign reversion to Japan in 1972, it postponed decisions over who would have control over these rocks, recognizing Japan’s so-called administrative rights but not sovereignty. This remains the U.S. position today, regardless of Tokyo’s hard lobbying and Beijing’s bellicosity.
Oil and natural gas deposits near these islands were discovered in 1968, leading some to say that the fight is simply a resource struggle. Yet as recently as 2008, Japanese and Chinese companies established joint development guidelines. This draws attention to an additional dynamic at play that involves lingering historical animosities, distinct from the new laws of the sea but drawing dividing lines just as powerfully. (...)
The United States did not create these various island disputes, but as the victor in 1945, it drew expedient boundaries to contain a history of conflict, and those boundaries are showing their limits. History matters, of course. Yet the propensity to treat it like a backdrop to the present, rather than learning from it, has helped transform Northeast Asia’s legacies into contemporary tinderboxes.
by Alexis Dudden, Dissent | Read more:
Image: Al Jazeera English
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Mr. Hasegawa, a fisherman. “I don’t think that the bombing of Hiroshima was a good thing.” Staring at the furious grey channel where the Pacific Ocean meets the Sea of Okhotsk off Hokkaido in northern Japan on a cold, clear day last March, he spoke like a trauma victim reliving the past: “But if the Americans had dropped the atomic bomb a month earlier, those islands out there would still be Japan’s.”
Were I unaware of the chronology of the summer of 1945 and had we been anywhere else, such a comment would make the engaging 64-year-old seem insensitive or odd. Yet on the horizon three miles in the distance were the snow-covered banks of one of Russia’s Kuril Islands, known to the Japanese who lived there until 1945 as Suishojima of the Habomai group. Mr. Hasegawa’s father was among the 17,291 Japanese who called it and several other nearby islands home. Admiral Yamamoto gathered his fleet there in 1941 to attack Pearl Harbor, and the region was once one of the three richest fishing grounds in the world, replete with salmon, herring, and cod.In August 1945 wartime Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s cataclysmic losses following America’s nuclear decimation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, its firebombing of most other cities, and its devastation of Okinawa island in the East China Sea. Equally important, Russia had disavowed its neutrality pact with Japan, and Soviet troops were advancing into Japanese-controlled Manchuria, northern Korea, and a number of islands around Hokkaido. As the emperor told his defeated subjects with staggering understatement, “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
What parts of its massive empire Japan would forfeit were then unknown. In the coming years, an area that once resembled an enormous octopus spanning North China and the southern Pacific near Australia would be reduced to the seahorse-shaped nation that we are now familiar with. But this reality has yet to be accepted fully in Japan, especially among people like Mr. Hasegawa, whose lives were upended by history. They were left to imagine any number of alternate realities.
On September 2, 1945, Hirohito’s representatives signed surrender papers to American officers aboard the USS Missouri. At the same moment, Soviet soldiers overwhelmed the islands that the Japanese continue to call the Northern Territories (yet which are known internationally as the southern part of Russia’s Kuril Island chain). At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Franklin Roosevelt promised these islands to Joseph Stalin in exchange for his troops’ entry into the war on the side of Allies. Within three days of the soldiers’ arrival on the southern Kurils, the Russians began to deport most of the Japanese to Hokkaido, although some were also taken to POW camps in Siberia. 20,000 Russians live on these islands today, and that, to paraphrase Vladimir Putin’s current mood, would appear to be that. Except, of course, for the evicted islanders and their descendants.
The peace treaty that ended war between Japan and the Allied Powers was signed in San Francisco in September 1951 and came into effect the following April. It dismantled Japan’s vast empire, returning the country largely to the shape it was in 1869, the year that Hokkaido became part of it. Whatever detractors say today, at the time Emperor Hirohito was pleased. On April 26, 1952, General Matthew Ridgway sent a telegram from Tokyo to the treaty’s chief architect in Washington, John Foster Dulles: “His Majesty the Emperor of Japan, on his own initiative, graciously called upon me this morning and personally expressed his gratitude … [for] making it possible for Japan to regain her sovereignty next Monday.” (...)
The internationally accepted map of Japan today dates from this moment in the early 1950s. The American negotiators involved in its creation excluded specific mention of the islands at the heart of each of Japan’s territorial disputes with Russia, China and Taiwan, and Korea. President Harry Truman’s special representative to the treaty process, John Foster Dulles, kept abundant correspondence, and his records along with those of other diplomats make clear that the final map would not fully commit to naming who owned what—for reasons ranging from real and perceived threats of Communist takeover of the entire area, including Japan, to a desire to cement the need for American power in the region. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was displeased with this gamble, especially in terms of the islands Japan contests with Russia. On January 17, 1952, Senator Tom Connally wrote to Dulles that the formula was “vague and contained the germ of future conflicting claims.”
Over sixty years later, that germ has developed and spread: in addition to the conflict with Russia, there is the perilous standoff in the East China Sea over several steep crags known to the Japanese as the Senkaku and to the Chinese and Taiwanese as the Diaoyutai, and the caustic on-again, off-again slugfest with Korea over some rocks in the sea that the Japanese call Takeshima and the Koreans, Dokdo. (...)
In 2012 Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami criticized all sides in the dispute for getting people “drunk” on nationalism’s “cheap liquor.” At the time, the Japanese government had just upped the ante by purchasing the islands for $26 million from the family that had held them privately for decades. The already tense situation erupted into widespread anti-Japanese protests and boycotts throughout China, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in trade loss, and leading to Japanese, Chinese, and American warships patrolling the area. Following months of frigid relations, China declared an “Air Defense Identification Zone” in the skies above the islands in November 2013, matching what Japan had maintained for decades but generating new outrage because Beijing dictated its position unilaterally and issued unusually expansive demands. (...)
In 1945 the United States captured these islands in the Battle for Okinawa—known locally as the “Typhoon of Steel”—and then governed them together with the rest of Okinawa, its pilots using them for target practice. When Washington agreed to Okinawa’s sovereign reversion to Japan in 1972, it postponed decisions over who would have control over these rocks, recognizing Japan’s so-called administrative rights but not sovereignty. This remains the U.S. position today, regardless of Tokyo’s hard lobbying and Beijing’s bellicosity.
Oil and natural gas deposits near these islands were discovered in 1968, leading some to say that the fight is simply a resource struggle. Yet as recently as 2008, Japanese and Chinese companies established joint development guidelines. This draws attention to an additional dynamic at play that involves lingering historical animosities, distinct from the new laws of the sea but drawing dividing lines just as powerfully. (...)
The United States did not create these various island disputes, but as the victor in 1945, it drew expedient boundaries to contain a history of conflict, and those boundaries are showing their limits. History matters, of course. Yet the propensity to treat it like a backdrop to the present, rather than learning from it, has helped transform Northeast Asia’s legacies into contemporary tinderboxes.
by Alexis Dudden, Dissent | Read more:
Image: Al Jazeera English
