Japanese Strategic Thinking toward Russia

Abstract

If the twentieth century exhibited a cyclical pattern in which Japanese-Russian relations alternated between long periods of distrust and enmity, punctuated by fleeting periods of rapprochement marked by a common strategic outlook, then the 20-year period between 1986 and 2005 could be said to be a microcosm of the previous 80 years. This period saw moments of intense mistrust and mutual acrimony between Moscow and Tokyo, but it also witnessed moments of warm relations, in which some saw the promise of normalized relations. As in the earlier periods of the twentieth century, Japanese leaders, policymakers, and analysts saw in Russia the embodiment of a potential strategic partner, but also a nation that was far from Japan psychologically (although it is geographically the closest neighbor). The unresolved issues of World War II (WWII) that have clouded Japan’s relations with its other neighbors in Northeast Asia have been the bane of Japanese-Russian relations since the end of the cold war. The Northern Territories not only represent lost territory for Tokyo, but in the minds of most Japanese also a sense of having been victimized in a dastardly fashion by the Soviet Union. Although Russia is viewed much more benignly than the Soviet Union, the obstacle that this issue poses has been much more difficult to overcome than anyone may have guessed 60 years ago.