A century after the signing of the 1925 treaty normalising their relations, Japan and Russia are more at odds than ever. Between diplomatic tensions, territorial disputes and demonstrations of force, tensions between the two countries have continued to grow, in a global context marked by the war in Ukraine and the rapprochement between Russia and North Korea.

January 20 marked the 100th anniversary of the Soviet-Japanese Basic Convention (Nisso Kihon Jōyaku), a treaty that normalized relations between the Empire of Japan and the Soviet Union, signed in 1925 by Lev Mikhailovich Karakhan of the Soviet Union and Kenkichi Yoshizawa of the Empire of Japan. The signing of the Soviet-Japanese Basic Convention resulted from long negotiations, some twenty years after the end of the war between the Russian Empire and the Japanese Empire (February 1904 – September 1905).

One hundred years later, almost everything seems to be against relations, especially in political and geopolitical terms. This situation has sent shockwaves throughout the region and the world, which continue to be exacerbated by the tense relations between the two countries, which have reached their “historic low” in decades.

Yet for Tokyo and Moscow, this anniversary could have been a rare opportunity to put the now-scarred bilateral Russian-Japanese relations back on a firmer footing by celebrating this symbolic anniversary.
But that was not the case, as various events and statements in early 2025 have further distanced the world’s ninth and twelfth most populous nations.

A terse statement to Tokyo
To mark January 20, 2025, Russian authorities simply sent their Japanese neighbour a terse statement. The statement focused less on the signing of the treaty 100 years ago than on the tense bilateral situation at the time, with a very sensitive territorial dispute between the two states over the Kuril archipelago: “The Russian side starts from the fact that there are still sensitive politicians and personalities in Japan who are aware of the harmful anti-Russian orientation of the official authorities and its negative consequences for the Japanese people” (Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, January 27, 2025).

The next day, this message was followed by another Russian decision, more of a sanction than a celebration: Moscow cancelled a bilateral agreement that for decades had allowed several Japanese-funded cultural centres to operate on Russian soil. These centres were supposed to work to forge closer economic and interpersonal ties. This sudden closure, called unacceptable by the Japanese government, is an eloquent symbol of the Russo-Japanese disenchantment of recent years.

However, the Kremlin did not stop in its provocation. A few days later, Russian forces deployed two Tu-95 bombers accompanied by two advanced Su-35 fighters over the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan for 8 long hours, forcing Tokyo to scramble its fighters to intercept the bombers that had penetrated the Japanese air defence identification zone, raising the ire of the Japanese authorities. Already last September, Tokyo had expressed its irritation over the incursion on three occasions of a Russian reconnaissance plane into Japanese airspace near Hokkaido.

Japan was declared a “hostile country” by Russia.
These repeated challenges reflect the sorry state of bilateral relations, which some observers say have reached their lowest point in a century. The fragile Russo-Japanese relationship has steadily weakened since 2022, when Russian officials officially designated Japan as a “hostile country,” even though Tokyo had just joined Western democracies in denouncing Russian aggression in Ukraine and related sanctions.

Inevitably, this has left a host of issues unresolved that cannot progress in this situation, such as the already very uncertain negotiations for a peace treaty between the two countries. Like the two neighbouring Koreas, which still have not concluded a peace treaty since the end of the 1950-1953 inter-Korean conflict, Japan remains technically at war with Russia in 2025, 80 years after the end of World War II.

Another source of continuing disagreement is the resolution of the territorial dispute over the Kuril archipelago (also beset by formidable obstacles). For the record, the quartet of islands at the centre of the dispute (the “Northern Territories” for Tokyo, 1,200 km northeast of the Japanese capital) lies between the Japanese peninsula of Hokkaido and the Russian peninsula of Kamchatka. In the final days of World War II, despite the two countries having signed a neutrality pact in April 1941, the Soviet Union seized these islands in the wake of the commitments made at the Yalta Conference (February 1945). This “acquisition” was never accepted by Tokyo.

Pyongyang and Moscow are getting closer
However, with the Treaty of San Francisco (1951), which officially ended hostilities between the Allied Powers and Japan, the latter renounced its claims to the Kurils. However, Tokyo still insists that the four southernmost islands of this coveted archipelago are historically Japanese and as such could not have been explicitly ceded to anyone else. The Kremlin, of course, does not have much sympathy
for this interpretation.

To make matters worse, bilateral relations have recently been aggravated by the open rapprochement between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Kim Jong-un’s hereditary dictatorship in North Korea. These include Vladimir Putin’s visit to North Korea in June 2024, Kim Jong-un’s visit to Russia in September 2023, and the thousands of North Korean soldiers who have joined Moscow’s forces on various Russian-Ukrainian fronts.

Japan is a regular rhetorical target of North Korean propaganda: in fact, Pyongyang has long considered Tokyo an enemy (like Seoul and Washington), also because of the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula between 1910 and 1945. As a result, the archipelago is rarely spared from the bellicose and disproportionate outbursts of a North Korean regime that is not new to this type of exercise – or from the launches of North Korean medium and long-range ballistic missiles that improperly fly over Japanese airspace (as in October 2022) or end their journey in the Sea of Japan (as in July 2023, March 2024 and January 2025). (Open Photo: the flags of Japan and Russia. 123rf)

Olivier Guillard/Ad Extra