Abstract
After Ichiro Hatoyama became Japan’s Prime Minister in December 1954, Japan and the Soviet Union began a series of negotiations to reach a peace treaty. The most difficult issue to be resolved was the territorial problem. As the two countries could not reach a final agreement on this issue, they left it unresolved and instead of signing a peace treaty, signed a Joint Declaration in October 1956.
This article reevaluates the shift of the United States policy toward these negotiations. Previous studies have made it clear that the role of the United States was significant in the negotiations and that although it had kept to a “non-involvement” policy at first, eventually it intervened in Japan’s decision-making process in the final stage. With regard to the interpretation of this policy shift, however, there is a divergence of views: some argue that the United States came to give full support to Japan, but others conclude that while it did give strong support to Japan, it avoided adopting any clear stance on Japan’s claim that “the Kurile Islands,” which Japan renounced in the San Francisco Peace Treaty, does not include the two disputed islands, Etorofu and Kunashiri. How can we construe the essence of the United States policy shift?
Based on the research at the National Archives at College Park, this article concludes the following three things. First, it is appropriate to interpret the policy shift as the latter. In September 1956, the United States government presented the Japanese counterpart with an aide-memoire, in which the United States stated clearly that the four disputed islands “should in justice be acknowledged as under Japanese sovereignty.” This was a strong political support to Japan, but the United States did not say anything about the definition of the Kurile Islands. The second argument here is that this US position was consistent throughout the Japan-Soviet negotiations. Though preceding studies tend to stress the aspect of the policy change, there was also continuity in the US policy to the effect that the United States government supported Japan in a political sense, but avoided any statement on the legal problems. Finally, this continuity resulted from the dilemma of the interest structure which the United States had in the Cold War era. In this period, there were two essential national interests of the United States in Asia, that is, the preservation of the San Francisco Peace Treaty regime and the maintenance of Japan-US alliance. But these interests were difficult to keep at the same time, and would be damaged by any change of the status quo in East Asia through the Japan-Soviet negotiations. Thus, the United States had to keep its policy, just because it had almost no other choices.
