Distant Neighbors Volume Two: Japanese-Russian Relations under Gorbachev and Yeltsin

Distant Neighbors Volume Two: Japanese-Russian Relations under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Hiroshi Kimura. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2000. 376 pp. $89.95 hardcover.

Why has there been less progress in Russia's relations with Japan over the past decade and a half than in Russia's relations with China, the Republic of Korea, and other countries? To what extent was this attributable to failure first by Gorbachev then by Yeltsin to understand the potential benefits of improving relations with Japan and to support needed territorial concessions? To what extent were they constrained by domestic politics?

Did Japanese policymakers understand and react appropriately to the significant changes that were taking place first in the USSR and then in Russia and to the opportunities and challenges they presented? Did they show a realistic appreciation of the intentions of policymakers in Moscow and the constraints under which they were operating?

Those are only a few of the questions that are addressed in Distant Neighbors, Hiroshi Kimura's monumental and impressive two-volume study of relations between Russia and Japan. The second volume, the focus of this review, analyzes the Gorbachev and Yeltsin periods.

Hiroshi Kimura, professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, is eminently well qualified to address this subject. He is Japanese, fluent in Russian and English. He has spent a lifetime studying Russia and its relations with Japan. Kimura is known to have close relations with Japanese policy makers, which provides him unique insights into the thinking behind Tokyo's policy toward Russia. These insights make his work invaluable to specialists. Nonspecialists will benefit from reading Kimura's analysis, which reflects his broad knowledge of Western international relations literature and his deep understanding of historical, cultural, and domestic political factors influencing foreign policy decision making and negotiating behavior in Moscow and Tokyo.

Kimura argues that progress under Gorbachev was impeded not only by wideranging Soviet domestic opposition to a territorial concession but also by Gorbachev's own attitude (85-94). Gorbachev understood Japan's importance better than his predecessors, who tended to treat Japan as an appendage of the United States. However, it was only late in his term in office that Gorbachev came to recognize that progress in relations with Japan would not be possible without some movement forward on their territorial dispute. Even then, however, he was more inclined to make changes in tactics than to make any meaningful concession (47-51).

There was a brief period at the very beginning of Yeltsin's term when he could have made a territorial concession. However, that window of opportunity soon was closed by the rise of rightist forces. Their growing influence over policy helped to persuade Yeltsin to announce a last-minute postponement of his planned September 1992 visit to Tokyo.

Despite the territorial stalemate, there were signs in the late 1990s that Moscow and Tokyo were interested in improving their relations. Kimura argues that Japan's desire to improve relations with Russia was sparked by growing concern about an increasingly powerful China and about instability on the Korean peninsula and elsewhere in Asia (204-05). Russia wanted better relations with Japan to counterbalance its closer relations with China and pressure from the West. Another motive was to seek Japanese cooperation in the development of the Russian Far East (183, 187, 230).

Tokyo's new interest in improved relations with Moscow was reflected in a July 1997 speech by then Prime Minister Hashimoto. Encouraged by Hashimoto's speech and other initiatives, Yeltsin proposed at their November 1997 Krasnoiarsk summit that Russia and Japan conclude a peace treaty by the year 2000. When he made this proposal, Yeltsin did not deny that a peace treaty would include a resolution of the territorial dispute. By the following November, however, pressure from Foreign Minister Primakov forced an ailing Yeltsin to reject a peace treaty proposal made by Hashimoto the previous spring (279).

Kimura suggests that Yeltsin's initially conciliatory attitude reflected his desire to ensure his place in history as a "wise leader" (212). It is not clear, however, that Yeltsin would have agreed to a territorial concession if he had not become ill. In another section, Kimura seems to recognize this point when he observes that although both Gorbachev and Yeltsin understood the importance of improving relations with Japan, it is doubtful that either was convinced that a territorial concession was necessary (276-77).

Hashimoto's proposal, rejected by Yeltsin, envisaged that Russia would renounce sovereignty over the disputed islands in return for administrative control. That proposal downplayed the islands' symbolic value to Russia, implying that they are important primarily for material and strategic reasons, a debatable assumption.