Drawing on Masayuki Takayama’s “Henkens自在” column in Shukan Shincho, this essay criticizes Russia’s seizure of the Northern Territories, the Siberian internment, the inhuman treatment of Japanese civilians and soldiers, and the weakness of Japanese media that refuse to confront these facts directly.
Through the statements of Foreign Minister Lavrov and the Russian ambassador to Japan, suspicions surrounding secret understandings at Yalta, Stalin’s desire for revenge, and Tsutomu Saito’s arguments in the Sankei Shimbun, it questions the historical and diplomatic truths that postwar Japan must face.

2019-03-22
That, however, is no reason to leave Russia’s brutality unquestioned.
The newspapers should learn at least a little from Tsutomu Saito.

The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s famous column “Henkens Jizai” carried in this week’s issue of Shukan Shincho.
Russia’s great crime.
Foreign Minister Lavrov arrogantly declared that the Northern Four Islands became Russian at the Yalta Conference.
Why does Japan not stop making excuses and simply accept that fact obediently, he said.
Around the same time, Ambassador Galuzin to Japan jumped on the bandwagon and said, “The Northern Four Islands were acquired in a completely lawful manner.”
Yet the media either remain silent before such Russian abuse, or like the Asahi Shimbun, fawn over Russia by saying, “Even just two islands.”
One wonders whether Editorial Bureau Chief Shiro Nakamura is even equipped with male organs.
Amid all this, Tsutomu Saito of the Sankei Shimbun spoke out boldly.
After the Japanese military had been disarmed, Russia invaded.
Was that not nothing but looting in the midst of a fire, he said.
And even that happened only when, on September 2, the Russians had only just reached Kunashiri at the very time the surrender ceremony was being held aboard the battleship Missouri.
It would be another three days before they entered Habomai and Shikotan.
Saito also said that Russia must be made to admit its state crime, citing the fact that it deceived 600,000 Japanese, abducted them to freezing lands, used them like slaves, and killed 60,000 of them.
I once worked with him when we were both active reporters covering the Atlanta Olympics.
He graduated from the Russian Department of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, and while serving as Moscow correspondent he got a major scoop on the breakup of the Soviet Communist Party.
He was slow in his work, but he wrote articles of complete sincerity.
This is the first time I have seen him write something in such an extreme tone.
Correspondents tend to love blindly the country of the language they studied.
If it is English, then America.
In his case, he has always shown deep favoritism toward Russia, so given that, this must have been something he truly could not forgive.
In fact, the Russians tell lies with utter contempt for others.
Lavrov speaks as if it were a “well-known fact” that the belonging of the Northern Four Islands was settled at the Yalta Conference in February 1945.
Yet in the Japanese translation by Soki Watanabe of Hoover Memoirs, it is written that only two years after the war an American newspaper got a scoop on the outline of the conference, and only eight years after that did the U.S. State Department release a report of the conference.
But it says, “It dealt only with European matters and contained not a single line concerning Japan.”
“At the time of the signing on September 2, Japan did not even know of the existence of the Yalta Agreement,” says Masaru Sato, and it did not know its contents either.
What sort of secret understanding existed between Franklin Roosevelt, FDR, and Stalin.
According to the records of William Sebald, chief of GHQ’s diplomatic bureau, “Russia wanted half of Hokkaido. MacArthur refused, and recommended Nagoya, where the U.S. military could keep it in check, but Russia did not agree.”
But MacArthur was a mere minor figure who was not even allowed to be involved in the atomic bombings.
He had no decision-making authority whatsoever.
It is FDR who remains the key.
He was extremely indulgent toward Stalin, gave the Soviet Union three votes in the United Nations, and let Eastern Europe fall entirely under Soviet control.
At every other turn Stalin spoke of “revenge for the Russo-Japanese War.”
He tried attacking at Nomonhan in order to defeat the Japanese military by his own strength, only to be routed instead.
He could never defeat the Japanese military outright.
But there was one chance to win.
When the Japanese forces had surrendered and were left unarmed.
The revenge had been planned beforehand.
First, to turn the Japanese into Siberian slaves.
Second, territorial seizure.
In Saito Tsutomu’s Stalin Hiroku, there is a naval officer’s statement arguing that “if we take South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, our fleet, which has been bottled up in the Sea of Okhotsk, will be able to move freely into the Pacific.”
It also speaks of a strategy to “seize the straits of the Kurils, Soya, Tsugaru, and Tsushima,” and says that Churchill encouraged this by saying he would welcome the Russian fleet entering the Pacific.
At the Yalta Conference, Churchill and the even more pro-Russian FDR joined Stalin.
Surely there must have been some arrangement in which Britain and America tacitly approved the invasion of all of Hokkaido and Tsushima.
Otherwise there is no explanation for why Britain and America tolerated such looting in the chaos after the war.
Still, Russia was rotten to the marrow, and when resisted by the surrendered Japanese military it lost its nerve and in the end could not even make it to Hokkaido.
Taking the Northern Four Islands was its limit.
That, however, is no reason to leave Russia’s brutality unquestioned.
The newspapers should learn at least a little from Tsutomu Saito.
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