The relationship between Japan and Russia is expanding economically despite the continuing territorial dispute in regards to the Kuril Islands:

Under normal circumstances, the Feb. 18 meeting between Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev should be a cause for celebration.

On Wednesday, the leaders will launch a massive development that will one day supply liquefied natural gas from Sakhalin, in the Russian Far East, to Japan and other parts of the Asia-Pacific as the region’s major economies continue their desperate search for new sources of energy.

But this summit, like so many between Russian and Japanese leaders in recent years, will be overshadowed by a piece of unfinished business that stretches back to the dying days of World War II, and which has cast a pall over bilateral ties ever since.

Days before Japan’s surrender in August 1945, Soviet troops began one final push in the Far East. Their target was a group of islands located in the freezing waters between the Japanese island of Hokkaido and Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.

There was little resistance as Moscow’s army seized Etorofu, Shikotan, Kunashiri and the Habomai islets after the Soviet Union declared war on Japan on August 8th, 1945.

In the months that followed, thousands of Japanese residents were forced to flee their homes, many of them settling in Nemuro on Hokkaido’s eastern coast.

Today, the Russians refer to the territories as the Southern Kurils, but to the Japanese they will always be the Northern Territories, grabbed by their former enemy in a final, audacious act of wartime recklessness.  [Global Post]

Talk to people from Japan and the Kuril Island dispute is their Dokdo.  They don’t go wacky crazy like some people in Korea get, but every Japanese I know has strong feelings about the Kuril Islands issue.

If anyone wonders why the Japanese government continues to make claims to Dokdo, part of it is linked back to the Kuril Island dispute:

The territorial dispute is, after all, about much more than rich fishing grounds and a proximity to Russian oil and gas fields. At stake is nothing less than national pride.

No Japanese leader, and certainly not one with Aso’s nationalist credentials, can afford to make concessions and risk the domestic political fallout that would inevitably follow.

More than a decade ago Boris Yeltsin and Ryutaro Hashimoto tried, and failed, to resolve the dispute. A 2001 proposal by the then-President Vladimir Putin to return two of the islands went nowhere.

And even the slightest hint of capitulation by Japan could send the wrong message to other countries with which it is embroiled in territorial spats: Taiwan, South Korea and, crucially, China.

What concerns me more then the Kuril Islands issue is the natural gas pipeline being built to Japan.  Judging by how Russia has used their energy pipelines to pressure European governments to capitulate to their demands, is Japan next?