Russia and Japan, two seemingly unrelated countries, have a deep history of mutual aggression in modern times.
During World War II, the Soviet Union not only beat Japan hard, but also circled a lot of land from Japan, which makes Japan still grumpy.
This has also become the biggest obstacle to the development between Japan and Russia today. It turned out that before August 1945, the former Soviet Union not only drove Japan out of the strategic base of the Far East, the Island of TheKhalin, but also monopolized the bridgehead of the Far East, and incidentally pocketed all the four northern islands of Japan's strategic barrier. The four islands are Guohou, Tooth Dance, Zejiao, and Sedan, with a total area of more than 5,000 square kilometers.
For Japan, these four islands are a crucial northern barrier. Without these four islands, the former Soviet Union would have landed on the Japanese mainland in only fifteen minutes. So after the end of World War II, Japan has been claiming lost territory from the former Soviet Union.
The main points are the four northern islands and the southern Sakhalin Island. In order to accomplish this historic goal, after the seventies,
With a noticeable improvement in Japan, Japan began to frequently show its goodwill to the former Soviet Union, not only selling various high-tech products to the former Soviet Union behind the back of the United States, secretly carrying out many transactions, and secretly sending secret-level industrial machine tools to the former Soviet Union.
The famous "Toshiba Incident" occurred in this context. Before 1983, a Soviet freighter departed from the Shibaura terminal in Japan, and secretly loaded dozens of boxes of five-axis linkage CNC machine tool components produced by Toshiba Machinery Company and were shipped to the Soviet Union.
This kind of high-end machine tool, which is banned from sale by the West, can not only significantly improve the hull strength of the submarine, but also greatly improve the performance of the propulsion system of the aircraft carrier.
It was also at this time that the United States lost its detection advantage over Soviet submarines, and it is still unable to change the status quo to this day. In the end, the matter was exposed, and the United States was greatly shocked and extremely annoyed.
As a result, Toshiba suffered extremely severe penalties. However, it is not difficult for us to find that the reason why Japan dared to risk the world and sell the top high-end five-axis linkage machine tools to the former Soviet Union was not to a large extent to make money.
Instead, he wanted to gain the favor of the former Soviet Union and pave the way for efforts to recover the four northern islands.
After all, this kind of kindness is indeed not something that ordinary behavior can reciprocate. The former Soviet Union has since made concessions. After the 1980s, both the Soviet Union and Japan wanted to engage in normal relations and exchanges, so they engaged in tentative and friendly negotiations.
In order to show its sincerity, the Soviet Union took the lead in making concessions, expressing its willingness to give up the two islands of Tooth Dance and Sedan first. The actual area of the two islands also amounts to 355 square kilometers.
In fact, it was not easy to get the Soviet Union to make such a regression through the negotiating table, which showed that the Soviet Union was sincere at that time.
But when the Soviet Union agreed to return part of the territory of The Four Islands of Japan, Japan made a very confusing decision at that time, and even changed its previous humble and respectful attitude.
It went so far as to demand that the Soviet Union make further compromises, hand over all four islands that have been captured and the end of the country, and that the ownership of Sakhalin Island and the entire Kuril Islands be renegotiated together.
In short, the territory occupied by the Japanese side after World War I must be talked about again.
This can directly annoy the negotiators of the former Soviet Union, which is equivalent to allowing the former Soviet Union to directly abandon the fruits of victory in the eastern battlefield of World War II and recover nearly 10,000 square kilometers of territory only through the negotiating table.
In the end, the representative of the former Soviet Union left a sentence: if you have the ability, you will come to seize the island. Turned around and left.
Two thousand years later, Russia tried to develop the Far East and Siberia. The Far East is the focus of the development plan.
The Far East has the oil resources and land that East Asia lacks, but Russia has no funds and no technology, and if it wants to successfully develop the Far East, it must rely on the financial and technical support of China, South Korea and Japan.
However, in order to achieve such a goal, the first thing that needs to be resolved is the core territorial issue with Japan.
To this end, Russia has taken out the problem of the four northern islands that Japan has claimed for fifty years and has not succeeded.
He once again took the initiative to return the two islands with an area of 355 square kilometers, namely Tooth Dance and Sedan, in order to completely resolve the territorial dispute and allow all countries to enter a peaceful development environment.
However, Japan still firmly disagreed with this solution, but also made concessions, saying that the ownership of Sakhalin Island would no longer be fought for, but the four northern islands must be returned in their entirety.
As a result, the talks were still hasty.
The Russian Far East has a huge amount of resources, including oil, coal, natural gas, rare metals and other resources, and a large area of unopened land is how much and how much, and these are the resources that Japan is urgently in short supply.
On the contrary, Japan has the technology, the funds, the ability, it can be said that Russia wants to develop the Far East, Japan is a very important role, or an indispensable party.
Therefore, as long as Russia wants to develop the Far East, it is believed that it will continue to play the return card to continue negotiations with Japan.
However, if Japan does not have better chips in its hands and just wants to return the four islands through peace talks, I believe that the possibility will only become less and less as time goes on.