MOSCOW, March 22. /TASS/. Tokyo’s decision to follow the mainstream trend of exerting sanction pressures on Moscow has entailed a rather painful backlash effect, while the expected aims have remained largely unattained, the director of the Asia and Africa Institute under the Moscow State University, Alexey Maslov, has told TASS. He is certain that in fact Japan has wasted the opportunity to further exploit the "territorial dispute narrative", which has been artificially fuelled in Japanese society for years.
Maslov recalled that the Russian Foreign Ministry on Monday issued a statement saying that Moscow was terminating all peace treaty talks with Tokyo against the backdrop of Japan’s unilaterally imposed restrictions over the situation in Ukraine. Maslov stressed that "this is just one of the several retaliatory moves and a far more painful one to Tokyo than Japan’s sanctions to Moscow."
"In its internal discourse Japan has more than once argued that its prime minister will have the territorial dispute settled and conclude a peace treaty with Russia virtually in no time. Such speculations began during the premiership of Shinzo Abe and continued under Fumio Kishida. They were part and parcel of election platforms and of election rhetoric, which went into high gear each time Russia and Japan were about to have a high-level meeting. The Japanese were rained with promises the problem was pretty close to solution, while in reality Russia made no hints to this effect. Nevertheless, it was important from the standpoint of maintaining the Japanese national spirit," Maslov explained. "Now this kind of rhetoric is about to vanish from Japan’s internal political narrative. There will be no chances of capitalizing on it any more."
Maslov believes that the Japanese leadership grossly misjudged the likely effects of its moves and in fact shut the window of opportunity for joint economic activity on the Kuril Islands with its own hands.
"The same applies to the simple travel rules for visiting Japanese delegations to the Kuril Islands, including trips by relatives to the graves of their ancestors. This is all over now," Maslov said.
Meanwhile, the crisis in Russia-Japan relations is unlikely to harm the Kuril Islands’ economy to any significant extent.
"Russia has its own plan for the Kuril Islands’ development and this plan remains effective. Firstly, the Iturup Island’s infrastructure will continue to be developed. There are Russian fishing cooperatives, there are hotels and tourist businesses and there are schools. All this remains in place," Maslov said. "It is obvious that Japanese investment is now ruled out. But I should say that it has been tiny all along. Tokyo has all the way argued that these territories should be administered jointly, co-governed by Russian and Japanese authorities. In reality, this is impossible to implement technically. As for Russia, it agreed to discuss only the possibility of using the islands for joint economic activity. As a result, Russia’s program is continuing, while Japan’s will apparently never get started."
Also, Maslov recalled Japan’s presence in the Russian economy beyond the Kuril Islands, such as an industrial facility for making engines for Mazda cars, and also a number of joint investment and supply projects in the health service. He agreed that such projects may now be mothballed or canceled altogether, but at the same time remarked that Japan "has never been the largest investor into the Far Eastern region."
"Japanese automobile licenses may be revoked and the sales of Japanese equipment and technologies in Russia may slump. But it should be remembered that Russia exports to Japan a large amount of seafood, which is eventually re-exported to many countries in East and Southeast Asia. In all likelihood we will terminate or reduce these supplies. Japan will then be left with very limited alternatives, because most of these resources come from Russia-controlled fishing areas," Maslov said. "Clearly, this worsens the general situation, but it would be wrong to say that such developments may cause colossal or cardinal harm to the Russian economy, greater than the one we get from the West."
Retaliatory measures
Earlier, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that Moscow was terminating peace treaty talks with Tokyo in the light of Japan’s newly-introduced unilateral restrictions against Russia over the situation in Ukraine. It stated that a decision had been made to terminate visa-free trips by Japanese citizens on the basis of agreements on visa-free exchanges between Russia’s South Kuril Islands and Japan of 1991 and the 1999 agreement on simple travel rules for those Japanese who would like to visit their former places of residence on the islands. Russia has quit the dialogue with Japan on joint economic activity on the South Kuril Islands and blocked the prolongation of Japan’s status of a sectoral dialogue partner of the Organization of Black Sea Economic Cooperation.
Moscow and Tokyo have been in talks on a peace treaty based on the results of World War II since the middle of last century. Sovereignty over the southern part of the Kuril Islands is the stumbling block. After World War II the whole archipelago was taken over by the Soviet Union, but Japan still disputes sovereignty over Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan and a group of small uninhabited islands. The Russian Foreign Ministry has repeatedly stressed that Russia’s sovereignty over these islands has a firm international legal basis to rely on and is indisputable.