Dmitry Medvedev’s trip to Kunashiri island on Monday — the first by a Russian leader — put Tokyo in a difficult position, especially with regard to conservatives in the opposition, and came as the government is embroiled in another heated territorial dispute with China over islands in the south.
Tokyo on Tuesday said it was temporarily bringing its ambassador to Moscow back to Japan to discuss the issue. It did not say how long the ambassador would remain.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the reaction “unacceptable” and told reporters in Oslo on Tuesday that the president would visit three other islands in the disputed chain.
Despite the spat, earlier in the day, Japan’s top government spokesman told reporters that Prime Minister Naoto Kan intended to go ahead with plans to arrange a meeting with Medvedev on the sidelines of a regional summit to be held in Japan on Nov. 13-14.
Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara said the move to bring back the ambassador was not intended to be antagonistic. He added that Japan’s overall policy to strengthen economic ties with Russia has not changed, though he stressed that Medvedev’s visit was highly regrettable.
The dispute over the chain of islands to which Kunashiri — Kunashir in Russian — belongs is one of the major issues that has held up a peace treaty between the two powers, which fought on opposite sides in World War II.
The chain — called the Northern Territories by Japan and the southern Kurils in Russia — is surrounded by rich fishing waters and is believed to have promising offshore oil and natural gas reserves, plus gold and silver deposits.
But the islands have suffered neglect and the population has plummeted since the fall of the Soviet Union.
During his visit, Medvedev vowed to improve infrastructure on the islands and raise their standard of living to one commensurate with the rest of Russia.
“The trip to Kunashir allowed him to look at the socio-economic situation on the islands with his own eyes,” Lavrov told reporters, according to Russian news wires. “The president noted that, up until now, allocations for social and economic development of that region of that region have been insufficient. That situation will be radically corrected.” He added that Moscow has no plan to follow Japan’s example and recall the Russian ambassador from Tokyo, though he did earlier say he would lodge a protest with Japan’s envoy.
Medvedev’s visit came amid a high-level dispute between Japan and China over another set of islands in the East China Sea.
Japan’s coast guard detained the captain of a Chinese fishing boat that collided with two Japanese patrol vessels near the islands on Sept. 7, sparking the diplomatic spat and setting off protests across China even after the captain was released.
That dispute and other tensions are believed to have been behind Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s decision to cancel a full meeting with Kan at a recent East Asia Summit in Hanoi. Instead, the two met informally for about 10 minutes.
