Kyodo News
March 31, 2022

Japan to again designate Russian-held isles as illegally occupied

Japan will once again describe Russia’s decades-long hold over a string of disputed northern islands as an “illegal occupation” in an annual foreign policy report, a draft showed Thursday, as bilateral ties sour following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

The classification will appear for the first time since 2003, reflecting Tokyo’s shift away from a conciliatory policy stance towards Moscow, taken in the hope that progress in negotiations over the islands off Hokkaido could lead to their return in the future, to a more hostile position.

The draft of the Diplomatic Bluebook for 2022 was obtained by Kyodo News.

The draft paper also said the islands, called the Southern Kurils in Russia and the Northern Territories in Japan, are “inherent” part of the territory of Japan, the words that had been absent since the 2011 edition.

“We are not under circumstances in which we can talk” about the issue with Russia, the draft bluebook says, while demanding strongly that Moscow heed criticism from the international community, withdraw its troops from Ukraine, and comply with international law.

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The 2019 bluebook dropped the sentence “the four northern islands belong to Japan” that had been used until 2018, in an apparent effort to appease the Kremlin. Starting in 2020, the report has said Japan has “sovereignty” over the islands.