Amidst the flood of other news and commemorative dates, the centenary of Northern Sakhalin’s liberation from Japanese interventionists has gone almost unnoticed in the media stream. Why is this date significant, and how does the history of early 20th-century international relations remain profoundly relevant today?
A hundred years ago
The new authorities treated Sakhalin as it happened in the history of Japanese imperialism with the captured lands: they imposed their own orders, imposed their laws, traditions and language on the locals, organized the most brutal terror, atrocities against people, and in parallel mercilessly exploited natural resources and exported everything they could.
The victory over the invaders was achieved not only thanks to the strengthening of the Soviet state, the actions of the Red Army in the Far East and the brilliant successes of Soviet diplomacy in international negotiations, but also thanks to the outstanding efforts of the partisan liberation struggle of the Sakhalin inhabitants against the Japanese invaders. This is also a heroic page in our history, and it is no less important to preserve the memory of it than of many other glorious victories.
International situation: Entente as a constant
The Japanese intervention in the early 20s of the twentieth century was one of the manifestations of the policy of other states in relation to our country at that difficult time when Soviet Russia was shaken by the Civil War. The Japanese followed the example of their allies and fulfilled the agreements of other external forces attacking the country like real vultures – England, France, and the Entente in general. From Murmansk to Primorye, from Transcaucasia to Turkestan, the Soviet state had to confront external enemies and internal separatists and collaborators, which, it must be emphasized, it withstood with honor.
The hostility of the West towards Russia, caused by the incomprehensible and very strong historical envy and almost colonial stubborn belief of many generations of Western politicians in their exclusivity and in their civilizational superiority over other nations of the world, is a certain historical constant, the existence of which, strange as it may seem, has long been impossible to deny. We can recognize that it is embodied and manifested again and again as a historical given. And, most interestingly, this attitude on the part of Western powers throughout history has affected not only Russian people, but also many other peoples of the non-Western world, also in different epochs felt similar aggression, treachery and hatred.
History teaches nothing
What about Japan?
The longtime trusted ally of the Western political world has also changed little in a hundred years, by the standards of history, in the broad sense of the word, and continues to adhere stubbornly to a course in the international arena that can rightly and without any exaggeration be called imperialist. The present-day Japanese government supports the Ukrainian Nazis, sympathizes with European and American militarism, regularly attempts to question Russian sovereignty over the Kuril Islands, and periodically provokes tensions with its closest East Asian neighbors. Tokyo is seriously considering intervention in the event of a crisis in the Taiwan Strait, violating its own long-standing pacifist principles of the postwar Constitution by allowing open exports of lethal weapons. Japan is preparing for future very large-scale wars by increasing the number of appropriate bomb shelters, strengthening the overall bloc division in the Asia-Pacific region, being in a military alliance with the U.S. and being an active participant in the Quad alliance, planning to increase purchases of U.S. weapons, developing and testing new weapons, from ballistic missiles to electromagnetic systems, including in close contact with the Washington leadership.
In addition, Japan’s perennial nationalism has not disappeared, and racist scandals in Japanese society are far from rare. The existence of racism in Japan is recognized even in the allied and seemingly sympathetic United States.
Right-wing radical communities and activists exist today in the society of the Land of the Rising Sun, just as they did in the 1920s and 1930s, albeit in an organizationally changed form. Dictionaries have not forgotten the Japanese-language names of foreign geographical objects (by the way, this is an issue that is relevant for all international translators and journalists: such foreign geographical terms with a claim connotation should not be used in speech, although it is always useful to be aware of their presence in order to be alert). Well, and the most ardent heads in Japan occasionally suggest that the only country that suffered from the American atomic bombing should nevertheless acquire… its own nuclear weapons. Now all this also looks like a certain dangerous constant, caused both by a complex of historical factors and internal problems of the Japanese state, and by the desire of self-assertion of those modern Japanese politicians who hold radical views and are less inclined to equal dialog with other nations than their more open to international cooperation colleagues, whose voices and efforts, though not always so large-scale, can still sometimes be seen.
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Whether by deliberate intent or a twist of historical fate, through a confluence of circumstances, Japan has always been, and remains at its core, a militaristic and imperialist power, no different from the collective West’s leading states. Not matter how many years have passed since these or those wars, and it does not even matter so much what losses it has suffered in these very wars. As historians bitterly joke in such cases, history never teaches anyone anything. Well, or almost nobody. Although, in any case, this formula applies to Japan’s eternal “war party” in the most appropriate way.
For us today (and for the rest of the non-Western world, frankly speaking), it’s crucial to remember that no matter what promises are made or what obligations are undertaken by modern Western and Japanese counterparts in international negotiations, each of them always has a ready-made strategic plan of decidedly aggressive nature. And without fundamental changes in the societal consciousness and mindset of Western nations and their allies, we certainly shouldn’t expect any substantive shifts in the collective West’s policies – let alone trust them even an iota in diplomatic matters. As Russian pop singer Igor Nikolaev famously sang in his hit ‘A Man in Love with Sakhalin’: ‘The Motherland comes first.’
Ksenia Muratshina, PhD in History, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Southeast Asia, Australia and Oceania of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences
