Japan Swaps Islands: Sakhalin for Kurils Treaty

Two empires redrew the map of the North Pacific on August 22, 1875, when Japan and Russia ratified the Treaty of Saint Petersburg, trading one vast, frozen territory for another. Japan surrendered all claims to the southern half of Sakhalin Island in exchange for the entire Kuril chain, a string of 56 volcanic islands stretching from Hokkaido to Kamchatka. The swap seemed rational at the time. Within thirty years, it would help trigger a war. The treaty resolved decades of overlapping claims in the region. Russian fur traders and Japanese fishermen had operated in both Sakhalin and the Kurils since the eighteenth century, and an 1855 agreement had awkwardly divided the Kurils while leaving Sakhalin under joint administration. The arrangement satisfied neither side. Russian settlers outnumbered Japanese on Sakhalin, while Japan dominated the southern Kurils. The 1875 treaty cleaned up the border by giving each nation exclusive control over one territory. Japan needed the Kurils for strategic access to the Pacific and for their rich fisheries. Russia wanted Sakhalin for its coal deposits and as a buffer for its Pacific naval base at Vladivostok. For the indigenous Ainu people living on both territories, the treaty was catastrophic. Many were forcibly relocated, separated from their traditional fishing and hunting grounds, and subjected to assimilation policies by whichever empire controlled their homeland. The clean division lasted exactly thirty years. After defeating Russia in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War, Japan took back southern Sakhalin through the Treaty of Portsmouth. The Soviet Union recaptured it and seized the Kurils in the final days of World War II. Russia holds both territories today, and Japan still claims the four southernmost Kuril islands. No peace treaty has ever been signed between the two countries, making the 1875 agreement the first chapter of a territorial dispute that remains unresolved 150 years later.