Published on July 18, 2019.
This article argues that, rather than rushing into a two-island-first return formula, Japan should first recover its proper historical understanding and secure the strength to stand as an independent nation before entering full-scale negotiations over the Northern Territories.
Through Germany’s loss of territory, the Morgenthau Plan, the Yalta secret agreement, the Soviet entry into the war against Japan, the division of the Korean Peninsula, and the communization of China, it points out that responsibility for the postwar Asian Cold War lies not only with the Soviet Union but with the Allied powers as a whole, including the United States and Britain.

July 18, 2019.
Japan should first recover its proper historical understanding and secure the strength to “stand as one nation,” and only then conduct full-scale negotiations on the Northern Territories issue.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
When the Japan-Russia summit was held in December 2016, I felt a sense of crisis as the Japanese media launched one trial balloon after another, such as “two islands first” and “joint rule,” and I issued a warning that the “two-island first return theory” is nothing more than a theory of abandoning the two islands of Kunashiri and Etorofu, in the December 2016 issue of this magazine.
What I appealed for as my conclusion was that Japan should first recover its proper historical understanding and secure the strength to “stand as one nation,” and only then conduct full-scale negotiations on the Northern Territories issue.
That view has not changed even now.
The Asian Cold War was something whose seeds were sown by the United States and Britain.
Watanabe.
Speaking of territorial reduction, Germany’s case was more tragic than Japan’s.
It lost East Prussia, and furthermore its territory was taken all the way to the Oder River, which is now the border with Poland.
Most of the expelled ethnic German residents headed for Berlin, but on the way they suffered looting and rape by Soviet soldiers, and by the time they arrived in Berlin they had nothing left.
Furthermore, what awaited them there were GIs whose pockets were bulging with Allied marks issued at the occupying powers’ discretion.
According to a paper in the U.S. National Archives, it is said that in 1946 as many as 500,000 German women made their living through prostitution.
Nakanishi.
As a result of the Second World War, in Europe, territorial changes more cruel than those of any past war occurred, and these were fixed as the postwar European order.
In Japan, there were the hardships of flight experienced by repatriates from the continent such as Manchuria, but in the process of those territorial changes after the war, hundreds of thousands, no, millions of ordinary Japanese and German civilians were deprived of their lives.
This tragic history has been completely left outside the field of view in the former Allied countries even now.
Therefore, from the perspective of Germans, there is a sense of wondering why Japanese people are so fixated on the “small problem” of the return of the Northern Territories, and why they do not pursue it as a responsibility of the postwar settlement by the Allied powers as a whole.
Watanabe.
Furthermore, what Japanese school education absolutely does not teach is the destruction of German industrial infrastructure and the plan to turn Germany into an agricultural country by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, the so-called “Morgenthau Plan.”
Before defeat, Germany exported industrial products and used the proceeds to import agricultural products, but because of Morgenthau’s “outrageous plan,” it was transformed into an economic structure dependent on agriculture and, as a result, was directly struck by famine.
According to Canadian historian James Bacque’s Crimes and Mercies, in addition to 5.7 million civilians inside Germany, 2.5 million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe and returned to the German mainland, and 1.1 million prisoners of war, a total of more than nine million people are said to have lost their lives to famine.
Regarding postwar European reconstruction, if one looks at Japanese textbooks, there are descriptions of the Marshall Plan, but they ignore the tragedy produced by the Morgenthau Plan.
It is important to describe in a balanced way not only the light brought by the victorious countries, but also the shadows.
I do not think that doing so would worsen Japan-U.S. relations.
Nakanishi.
The historical view and view of international order of contemporary Japanese people were formed during the Cold War, and especially in Asia, the Soviet Union was “evil,” the United States and Britain were “good,” and, just as in the Second World War, in the Cold War as well “justice won”; therefore, it was only natural that the Empire of Japan and the Soviet Union, both “evil empires,” collapsed—this is the general understanding of history.
This historical view of “the United States and Britain equal justice” became even stronger after the end of the Cold War and continues to bind Japanese diplomacy even now.
However, let me say that this was the height of the “Tokyo Trial view of history” and a great error.
And regarding the division of the Korean Peninsula into North and South, which is precisely a problem still in progress today, if we trace it back, it lies in the fact that Britain and the United States encouraged the Soviet Union’s entry into the war against Japan through the Yalta secret agreement.
Because the Soviet Army that invaded Manchuria stayed there for more than a year, the Chinese Communist Party was able to use that area as its base, fight through the Second Chinese Civil War, and found the People’s Republic of China.
Seen in that way, the Asian Cold War, beginning with the division of the Korean Peninsula, was something whose seeds were sown by the United States and Britain.
The tragedy of repatriation from Manchuria and the communization of China were the responsibility not only of the Soviet Union but also of the United States and Britain, and it is fair to say that everything was due to the “Yalta secret agreement.”
Watanabe.
All the weapons held by the Kwantung Army in Manchuria were handed over to the Chinese Communist Party, after all.
Nakanishi.
At that point, it was obvious that Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army, cut off from support by the United States, would be defeated by the Communist Army.
In this way, a communist state was born on the Chinese continent, and by the Yalta Conference, it was similarly arranged that the Korean Peninsula would be placed under the trusteeship of the Allied powers, including the Soviet Union.
However, the Soviet Union occupied the area north of the 38th parallel, sent in Kim Il-sung, and established North Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
The tragedy of the division between North and South begins here, and its chief cause should rather be sought in the Anglo-Saxon allies, the United States and Britain.
At the very least, in the sense that they caused the disorder in Northeast Asia, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union should be regarded as precisely “equally guilty.”
What every Japanese person should remember above all is the fact that the Soviet Union’s entry into the war against Japan was carried out after unilaterally breaking the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact.
It was a clear violation of international law, and the United States and Britain, which urged Stalin to enter the war against Japan, should properly be charged with instigation and aiding and abetting of a war of aggression against Japan.
Stalin was originally a cowardly man, so without the backing of Roosevelt and Churchill, there is a high possibility that he would have hesitated to enter the war against Japan.
In that sense, the United States and Britain truly lent a hand to the Soviet invasion of Japan.
As a result, the Soviet Union obtained Manchuria, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands, which had been under Japanese rule, and throughout postwar Asia a storm of conflict caused by the spread of communism came to rage.
In other words, it is necessary to see all the suffering surrounding the postwar Asian Cold War as “the responsibility of the Allied powers as a whole.”
Watanabe.
After that, although Britain and the United States won the Great War, Poland ultimately fell into Stalin’s hands.
The core of the “Hull Note” was that Japan should withdraw from China, but in the end China too became communist.
This is the outcome brought about by the contradiction of the Atlantic Charter, which appealed for the worldwide construction of democracy while adding the Soviet Union, which was not a democratic country, to the Allied powers.
It shows how mistaken the war leadership of Roosevelt and Churchill was.
However, many British and American history books turn their eyes away from these facts.
In other words, they ignore them.
Because the evaluation that “Roosevelt and Churchill were great leaders” would collapse from the ground up.
Also, most Japanese history books avert their eyes from the outcome brought about by the war leadership of the two men, namely the expansion of communism, and are enthusiastic only about denouncing the foolishness of Japanese leaders of the same period.
There is no attitude whatsoever of exploring the historical facts and causal relationships of that time from an international perspective, and this is extremely regrettable.
This article continues.