Putin miscalculates … in the Northern Territories of Japan
Observers in the West may or may not care much about Ukraine or Putin, per se. But they may care about getting back at Russia. Why? For being an historically unreliable bargaining partner.
This will be the third essay that I have posted in these last few months that will have made heavy contact with the war in the Pacific. One theme common to all of these essays is a question on the part of the Naïve Economist: Why can’t parties to (possibly fraught) exchange bargain their way to mutually beneficial, credible agreements?[1][2] Who doesn’t like a deal? Sometimes antagonists do cut deals that yield enduring peace and prosperity, but no one really notices when things work well. Much more conspicuous and cinematic are the failures to cut deals. Failures and war make for compelling copy, and part of the tragedy is that war creates opportunities for incompetent leadership to appear to rise to the occasion. We thus end up supplanting competent governance (and the boring peace it yields) with a seemingly heroic governance-by-crisis on the part of the incompetents who failed to secure the peace in the first place. Incompetence rewards incompetence.
The Pacific War provides rich context for exploring puzzles about failed bargaining. One can discern parallels to ongoing matters.
In 1867 the United States cut a deal with Russia to buy Alaska for the princely sum of $7 million. Paraphrasing contracting theorist Ian MacNeil: The deal proved to be “transactional” in that it was “sharp in” by clear agreement and “sharp out” by clear execution. Less “transactional” and more “relational”—and more fraught and antagonistic—have been territorial matters between Russia and Japan in the northwestern Pacific. Indeed, Russia and Japan have yet to sign a treaty that fully resolves issues outstanding from the Second World War. Those issues include the final disposition of the southern-most of the Kurile Islands. Those same issues continue to interject themselves into the headline news in Japan from year to year.
The Japanese recognize the southern Kurile Islands as the “Northern Territories.” The Russians recognize the Northern Territories as the “Southern Kurile Islands.” The Russians and Japanese have been tussling over the Kurile Islands as well as over the island of Sakhalin for most of two centuries. Sakhalin constitutes the most northern link in the chain of major islands that encompasses Japan itself. It lies just north of island of Hokkaido. The Kurile island chain, meanwhile, runs from Hokkaido to the Kamchatkan peninsula. Everyone will know Kamchatka from having played the board game Risk. If you’re the Russian navy, then controlling at least some of the islands affords ready access from the Sea of Okhotsk to the open Pacific.
Treaties in 1855 and 1875 did not definitively resolve the issues involving the Kuriles and Sakhalin. Neither did the settlement to the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 definitively resolve the issues. Having decisively crushed Russian naval capacity in the Pacific, the Japanese made a point of recovering control over the southern half of Sakhalin in the settlement to the war. Theodore Roosevelt mediated the deal. In 1945 the Soviets took the whole of Sakhalin back and seized all of the Kuriles. Franklin Roosevelt had some hand in mediating that result.
Galling, it might be to some Japanese observers, is the fact that Russia declared war on Japan on August 8, 1945, the day after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Japan surrendered on August 15. The Soviets then seized the Kuriles and Sakhalin as part of the spoils of war.
An understanding common in the United States is that it was the second atomic bomb over Nagasaki that finally induced the Japanese leadership to agree to surrender unconditionally. Another view is that Soviet intervention largely informed the decision of the leadership to surrender—to the Americans with the hope that the Americans could put a stop to the Soviet advance. At 12:02 in the morning on August 9, Soviet columns started to roll into Japanese-occupied Manchuria. The Japanese forces in Manchuria and Korea were formidable on paper, but they were outnumbered, vastly outgunned, and (it proved) out-matched by the Soviets. Soviet armies had honed their doctrines for mechanized warfare through a lot of hard learning-by-doing against the Germans. The Japanese anticipated a Soviet attack some time after August 1945. They ended up getting caught off guard, and they had not adapted themselves well to mechanized war. The fighting in Manchuria was different than the naval battle in the Pacific or the fighting in the jungles of Burma or on the islands of the South Pacific.
With the Soviets having vanquished the Japanese in Manchuria in virtually the space of a week and moving into Korea, the Americans found themselves tossing out a crude proposal to stop the Soviet advance: The Soviet could occupy the Korean peninsula as far south as the 38th parallel. The Americans would occupy the south. Amazingly, the Soviets agreed.
That is about where the hostilities ended, but that only marked the beginning of an ordeal lasting years for the nearly 3 million Japanese soldiers and civilians who had been operating in Manchuria, Sakhalin, the Kuriles, and Korea north of the 38th parallel. The understanding in English language sources, including sources translated from Russian and Japanese, seems consistent: well more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers found themselves working and starving in (mostly Siberian) gulags.[3] Those Japanese soldiers joined about 3 million German soldiers. As many as 100,000 Japanese perished as well as many, many more Germans soldiers. Most Japanese soldiers did make it back to Japan, but not after years of haggling and reneging on commitments on the part of the Soviets to repatriate Japanese soldiers and civilians. The entire project seemed to wrap up some time after Stalin’s death in 1953. Stalin seemed to have been holding up resolution of the war in Korea (1950-1953) as well as repatriation of prisoners-of-war from the Second World War.
Numbers on civilians are less certain, but fatalities exceeding 350,000 in the first year after the surrender seem consistent with English-language sources and translated sources. Meanwhile, women made accounts of systematic and repeated rape, the norm being: make yourselves available or be raped and then exterminated. It seems that most civilians never made it back to Japan—that is, as far as I can tell from available sources, most of nearly 2 million civilians, about two-thirds of whom were women, perished in the immediate aftermath of the war.
The third installment in the nearly 10-hour series The Human Condition (人間の條件, 1959-1961) makes a point of dramatizing the experience in prison camps as well as the experiences of the majority-female, civilian population. It makes for compelling, albeit tough, viewing, and it does not correspond to nationalistic apologia. Indeed, the people who maintain The Criterion Collection label put it thusly:
Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth humanist drama is one of the most staggering achievements of Japanese cinema. Originally filmed and released in three parts, the nine-and-a-half-hour The Human Condition …, adapted from Junpei Gomikawa’s six-volume novel, tells of the journey of the well-intentioned yet naive Kaji (handsome Japanese superstar Tatsuya Nakadai) from labor camp supervisor to Imperial Army soldier to Soviet POW. Constantly trying to rise above a corrupt system, Kaji time and again finds his morals an impediment rather than an advantage. A raw indictment of its nation’s wartime mentality as well as a personal existential tragedy, Kobayashi’s riveting, gorgeously filmed epic is novelistic cinema at its best.
The Human Condition will not agree with all political sensibilities, but it does, I suspect, reveal something about the fact that the war in Ukraine has riled up Japan as much as Poland and (oddly) Britain. (BBC coverage is hysterical.) Declaring war on Japan in August 1945 may have provided the Soviets with the opportunity to “get back” at the Japanese for humiliation the Japanese inflicted on Russia 40 years earlier. But, here we are nearly 80 years later, and the war in Ukraine seems to have aroused long-simmering resentment. The resentment may have had a chance to fade away had the Russians and the Japanese been able to resolve their differences over the “Northern Territories,” but it is hard to know. Had the Russians not seized those southern-most islands of the Kurile island chain, would the antagonist merely have found something else to fight about? Would “unresolved issues” have encompassed not the null set but the status of the southern half of Sakhalin?
Be that as it may, the Russians seem to have gone out of their way to antagonize the Japanese in just the last few months. Or are the Russians getting worried about the Japanese doing something? Japan had made a point of sending non-lethal aid by the plane-load to Ukraine[4], and there is some understanding in Japan, it seems, that the Russians are underperforming in Ukraine—just as they did during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Lively imaginations have conjured up the fanciful idea that Russian failure might yield a more broad unraveling of Russian empire. Could Japan nab the “Northern Territories?”[5] The Russians, meanwhile, have sent naval flotillas through the Tsugaru Strait between the major Japanese islands of Honshu and Hokkaido on more than one occasion these last few months.[6][7] At least one Russian exercise has involved shooting cruise missiles from submarines operating in the Sea of Japan.[8] The Russians have achieved their objective in getting the Japanese to notice. For their part, the Japanese and American navies have put on a joint exercise in the Sea of Japan, ostensibly for the benefit of the North Koreans, but the Russians may also have been put on notice.[9] One way or the other, one can see that there is a lot of activity in the northwest Pacific.
The original impetus for this short essay was the seemingly facile idea that Putin’s Russia appears ever opportunistic and ready to nibble at the edges of empire. But, the Naïve Economist can only wonder, why bother? Nibbling at the edges of empire seems so unsophisticated and unproductive. Why not just participate in global trade and enrich one’s country for the benefit of all Russians? Is it really necessary to antagonize neighboring countries? Why not just cut deals and realize mutual gains as in the example of the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867?
Of course, it is not obvious that the ruling clique in Russia is concerned first and foremost with securing mutual gains and with enriching the country for the benefit of all citizens. In his memoir of his time as premier of the Czech Republic, To the Castle and Back (2007), Vaclav Havel complained that the countries of the former Eastern Bloc had become absorbed in a system of “Mafia Capitalism” wrapped up in the gilded gift packaging of “Mafia Democracy.” The Blob[10] that was the former class of apparatchiks set themselves up as the new class of apparatchiks. Russia would seem to constitute Exhibit A of the phenomenon.
In 1984 George Orwell famously writes that, “The object of power is power” for its own sake. I remember being puzzled when I first read that passage as a very young person, but the examples of North Korea and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe proved to be illuminating. Take away the “Capitalism” bit and the “Democracy” bit from Vaclav Havel’s formulation, and you are left with “Mafia.” Mafia governance is about preserving the privileges of the Mafia ruling clique … in Russia, in North Korea, in Zimbabwe, … in Iran, in China … in the current-day United States, one might dare say in that one can argue that it has long been saddled with its own Blob, its own class of entrenched, self-dealing apparatchiks. The mafia regimes are willing to run their countries into the ground and kill millions of their own citizens if it enables them to maintain a secure hold on power.
The Ukrainians have a lot of experience losing millions to support Russian mafia. The war, meanwhile, gives them their first great opportunity to literally fight Russians. One should not be too surprised to see that they’ve taken up the fight with great enthusiasm. At the same time, there is some understanding in Japan that there are some parallels between the conflict in Ukraine and the Japan’s own experiences with Russia. The Japanese have been sensitive to the Russians’ habit of nibbling at the edges of empire, whether in Ukraine, in Afghanistan, in Georgia or in the northwest Pacific. Japanese observers may further perceive parallels between the fighting in Ukraine and the fighting in August 1945. Long-story short: The Ukraine business has aggravated a lot of bad feeling … in Poland (not too surprising, perhaps) and in Japan (less surprising once one does a little reading). Hence “Putin’s miscalculation.” The fulminations in the British media, led by the BBC, are less immediately rationalizable.
[3] See, for example, Kuznetsov, S.I. “The Situation of Japanese Prisoners of War in Soviet Camps (1945-1956).” Translated by David M. Glantz. Journal of Slavic Military Studies 8 (1995): 612-629. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13518049508430206
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/11/world/asia/japan-military-russia-ukraine.html
[5] https://www.economist.com/asia/2022/04/02/the-invasion-of-ukraine-has-turned-japan-definitively-against-russia
[6] https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2022-03-15/japan-russia-ukraine-sanctions-warships-hokkaido-military-drills-5350089.html
[7] https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2022/03/15/japan-Russian-warships-Soya-Strait-diplomatic-protest-war-drill-Ukraine/3171647344515/
[8] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/04/15/national/russia-missile-test-sea-of-japan/
[9] https://thediplomat.com/2022/04/japan-us-hold-navy-drills-off-koreas-amid-nuke-test-worry/
[10] Many thanks to Obama advisor Ben Rhodes for giving us the language and the truth about “the Blob” of Washington apparatchiks. He just could not help himself. See, for example, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/05/07/blob-abides/
Excellent insights. I never would have made the connection between the seizure of the Kurile Islands and Sakhalin Island at the end of the World War II and the war in Ukraine today.