While the United Nations were devoting their last efforts towards the defeat of the Axis Powers, strategists within the U. S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had started to prepare for the “next war.” The USSR appeared as the most probable enemy in the war plans from the fall of 1945. Rapid demobilization and resulting reorganization of American armed forces, however, curtailed effective deterrence toward the USSR which maintained relatively superior forces along the “Iron Curtain.”
Official declaration of the Cold War by President Truman in 1947 accelerated the rapid strengthening of the U. S. armed forces and a number of emergency war plans, short and long term, were drafted.
In this article, the author has endeavoured to trace the evolution of the American strategy toward the USSR between 1945 and 1949, based chiefly on the JCS Official History. Special attention has been paid to the changing role of nuclear weapons within the overall strategy.
The Far East was always given low priority by war planners and it led to the retreat of the U. S. defense perimeter in Asia since the “loss of China” in the fall of 1949. Japan under the occupation was, however, enjoying calm and peaceful days.

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The expansion and convergence of Japan's “borders” at first glance looks natural. However, if we shift it to the “periphery,” one can see some artificialness. Previous research discussed Japan's border and boundary, presenting novel views on Japan's past and present.
As an island nation, Japan has been beset with problems and conflicts. It is difficult to attribute these contradictions by using simple oppositional relations such as the ‘central’ and the ‘periphery.’ The formation of modern Japan as an island nation is a product of peripherally located islands integrated towards the central mainland. On the other hand, the fact that war, coercion, and competition among islands ended diversification cannot be overlooked.
The boundary formation of Japan's islands possibly went through four phases: “blur,” a bound area without a defined range but with a spread; “zone,” a boundary with a recognized width; “dashed line,” a confirmed but unofficial line demarcating sphere of influence); and “solid line,” a legally defined border.
This change may have been affected by the expansion of the power sphere and the island groups being separated by the straits. However, ancient Japan, or Wa, could not have had territorial ambition towards the Asian continent. On the contrary, Wa acquired its authority from the Chinese and was on its way to building a unified legal state. The straits were a buffer zone between ancient Japan and China and Korea.
Soon, Japan's sphere of power expanded to distant islands by developing an occupational foundation. In the modern era, to the west and to the south, Japan expanded to the Korean peninsula and the inlands of the Asian continent, and eventually expanded to the Inner and the Outer South Seas. In those areas, the use of armed forces to wage war assumed a major role in the formation of the “border.” To the north, despite Japan's peaceful acquisition of Chishima, the history of border transformation, after the complete occupation of Sakhalin following the Russo-Japanese War, has been irrevocably tied to war.
This article reconsiders the meaning of the Japan's ‘border’ and the processes that lead from its expansion to its reduction following World War II. This will be done by highlighting the issues and problems relating to border islands. The author pays particular attention to islands where turbulent changes lead to confusion in the society, to decline, and to being ‘peripheralized.’ Examining how these border islands managed hardships will prove indispensable for viewing and establishing policies on Japan's future border islands.
There have been arguments against studying the meaning of “boundaries” in the context of Japanese history, but this article challenges the present conditions.

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When the Soviet Union declared war on Japan in August 1945, the latter was almost exhausted after over three years of the Pacific War. Ironically enough, at that moment Japan was trying in vain to find a way out of the war by means of the good offices of the Soviet Union. Because of such circumstances, the people in the Soviet Union seemed to be apathetic at best to another round of war after the deadly fighting with Nazi Germany. Thus, to justify the war with Japan, Stalin felt it even necessary to cite the old humiliation due to the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 to 1905.
Until August 1945, a major concern of Stalin was how to adroitly find an opportune moment to enter into the war against Japan. After the Japanese surrender, he was very resolute in trying to ensure the Soviets a proper place as a great victorious power. The present paper intends to show what Soviet Russia attained and how, through joining her allies in defeating Japan.
Though Stalin wished to expand the Soviet security zone as far as possible, he also recognized that such an advancement of Soviet power would be possible only in areas subdued by Soviet armed forces. In this sense, his foreign policy reflects his trust in strength. General V. Chuikov, designated a military attache at the Soviet Embassy in Chungking in autumn 1940, records an interesting statement suggestive of Stalin's future policy in Asia after the war. Stalin told Chuikov then that as long as Chinese communists were less able than the Kuomingtang to resist Japanese aggression, the USSR could not help but bolster Chinese nationalists despite her ideological sympathy for the communists, because any Chinese prolonged resistance would lessen the Japanese threat to Soviet far eastern borders (V. I. Chuikov, Missiya v Kitae, 1983).
Such a view about the importance of strength in foreign policy may be considered an ingredient of a general belief system rather than a circumstantial perception. Consequently, this “operational code” probably convinced Stalin, after the Second World War, that the Soviet Union should be cautious in conducting her occupation policy in Japan. The Soviet Union was prepared to accept U. S. predominance in Japan provided that Soviet basic security requirements would be satisfied. Besides this precondition, all Stalin wished for was an apparent equality with the U. S. in controlling Japan.
The Soviet Union and the United States had heated arguments over the allied control machinery regarding Japan. The United States was in a much more advantageous position because of the sheer fact of the existence of American armies in Japan. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union also had a lever for influencing the U. S. policy in Japan. This lever was her dominant status in Eastern Europe. If the United States wanted to gain some concessions in Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union, the former was obliged to make concessions regarding Japan. Thus both countries could, before the end of 1945, come to a compromise to establish the Far Eastern Commission and the Allied Council for Japan. Afterwards, with the advent of the Cold War, the Soviet Union became more and more antagonistic towards U. S. conduct in Japan. But that is another story.

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