The article attempts to treat both the ‘Okinawa problem’, implying its pending territorial status until the Ryukyus reversion, and the ongoing Russo-Japanese dispute over the ‘Northern territories’ as interdependent political issues. Entertaining no doubts about the term ‘residual’ as it was commonly a pplied to the issue of Okinawa's ‘sovereignty’, this article suggests to interpret the ‘Okinawa problem’ as a ‘residual’ territorial dispute. A ‘territorial dispute’ is seen as occurring, according to Paul Huth's definition, when “both governments seek control of and sovereign rights over the same territory”.
Both territorial issues are rooted in the post-World war II rivalry of two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, for the control of geopolitical space. The two issues are unique, however, since they represent territorial disputes, actual and potential, respectively, between both superpowers and a single foreign power, Japan. Moreover, their very existence as the disputes was largely sustained by the continuous rivalry of the superpowers, thus forming a peculiar ‘balance of power’. Hence, in view of a broad range of the research subject and its so far unexplored quality, the primary goal of the article is to pose a scholarly problem rather than draw any immediate conclusions.
Emphasizing their differences from the legal standpoint, the two territorial issues were dealt with in separate Articles, namely 2 (c) and 3, of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. However, according to the treaty's principal author, John Foster Dulles, Article 26 provided for the possibility of the United States' gaining “full sovereignty over the Ryukyus”, in case “Japan recognized that the Soviet Union was entitled to full sovereignty over the Kuriles”.
It is this particular interpretation, personally given by Dulles to Japan's Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru in August 1956, which makes it possible to regard the ‘Okinawa issue’ as a residual territorial dispute. Conveyed inn the course of the Soviet-Japanese normalization talks, this statement served to intensify the interdependence of both territorial issues and to confirm the US position of a concerned ‘third power’. The subsequent application of the ‘Okinawa-Kuriles’ linkage by both the Japanese and the Soviet negotiators, namely Mono Ichiro and Nikita Khruschev, in October 1956 testify to the political uses of international law on their part.
The article's concluding section draws critical attention to post-Cold war efforts to employ the ‘Okinawa reversion’ model for the purpose of resolving the Russo-Japanese territorial dispute in a way presumably identical to the Cold war approach. The Appendix contains a unique document which was found in the US National Archives. Dated August 8, 1967, it is a ‘secret memorandum’ written by Legal Advisor Mark Feldman to Richard Sneider, the US Department of State country director for Japan. This document, in particular, addressed the issue of possible Ryukyus reversion “by executive agreement without formal congressional action”. As such, it is presumed to be directly applicable in terms of modeling the ‘Kuriles issue’ resolution on the ‘Okinawa reversion’ in the context of foreign policy prerogatives of the President and the Diet in post-Soviet Russia.
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