Published on August 13, 2019.
This article introduces Sankei Shimbun editorial adviser Tsutomu Saito’s rebuttal to the Russian ambassador, examining the seizure of the Northern Territories, the Siberian internment, and the Katyn Forest massacre as unresolved postwar state crimes under Stalin’s regime.

August 13, 2019.
Speaking of the “death factories” pointed out by the ambassador, how does he explain the atrocity and inhumanity of the Siberian internment?
After the war, Japanese people in areas formerly under Japanese control were deceived with the word “damoi,” meaning “return home.”
Everyone who subscribes to the Sankei Shimbun must have felt that this morning’s Sankei shone with particular brilliance.
Black is black, white is white, and only the truth is asserted.
Far from yielding a single step before Russia, the paper showed a magnificent journalistic spirit by further stating, as a newspaper, that the views expressed by its editorial adviser in his dispute with the Russian ambassador to Japan were revealing the facts.
Our paper’s editorial adviser issues a further rebuttal to the Russian ambassador over the Northern Territories.
Occupied after surrender — a state crime.
By the 7th, Russian Ambassador to Japan Mikhail Galuzin had used SNS, or social networking services, to rebut the content of a lecture given by Tsutomu Saito, editorial adviser of the Sankei Shimbun, concerning the Northern Territories issue.
In his lecture, Mr. Saito spoke about the circumstances under which the Soviet Union seized the four Northern Islands after Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration.
In his rebuttal, the ambassador stated such things as, “Are you condemning the Soviet Union for entering the war against Japan in 1945? Do you call the completely lawful acquisition of the Southern Kurils a ‘crime’?”
In response, this paper publishes Mr. Saito’s further rebuttal.
See page 2 for “The Editorial” and “Northern Territories Day.”
Regarding my remarks at the Kyushu Seiron Konwakai on January 24, I received a named “rebuttal” from Russian Ambassador to Japan Galuzin through the embassy’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.
It is a rebuttal from His Excellency the ambassador, highly praised as a bright talent of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s “Japan school,” but, with due respect, it is hard to call it a proper rebuttal.
From the very beginning, regarding the “acquisition” of the Northern Territories, which Russia calls the Southern Kurils, he used the unfamiliar expression “carried out completely legally.”
I wondered whether some new evidence had emerged, but there was none.
It seems that he was displeased that the “acquisition” was described as a state “crime.”
For a very long time, I have argued that the seizure of the Northern Territories, the Siberian internment carried out together with it, and the abduction cases by North Korea are unresolved postwar “state crimes,” so it is my fault that the ambassador is now offering a “rebuttal.”
By Stalin’s direct order, the Soviet Army unilaterally violated the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact in August 1945, entered the war against Japan, and, after Japan’s surrender, invaded and occupied the four defenseless islands.
If this is not a “crime,” what is it?
It is not merely a state crime, but also an “international crime” in violation of the Atlantic Charter, which clearly stipulated “no territorial aggrandizement.”
The ambassador brings up, as his only material for rebutting me, the fact that Japan was an ally of Nazi Germany, which carried out the Jewish Holocaust.
I cannot understand this association at all.
Does he wish to say that Hitler was “the most sinful criminal,” but Stalin was not?
Does he mean that because Japan was an “ally,” Japan too was the same kind of criminal as the Nazis?
I would like to ask him in return.
When, where, and what kind of “Holocaust” did Japan carry out?
Speaking of the “death factories” pointed out by the ambassador, how does he explain the atrocity and inhumanity of the Siberian internment?
After the war, as many as 600,000 Japanese people from areas formerly under Japanese control were deceived with the word “damoi,” meaning “return home,” abducted to a land of bitter cold, worked virtually like slave laborers, and 60,000 of them, though all figures remain unconfirmed, died in bitter regret.
In fact, my late father was also an internee who endured bitter hardship.
During the Second World War, the Katyn Forest massacre occurred in western Russia, where more than 20,000 Polish officers and others were massacred.
Stalin consistently continued to tell the world the enormous lie that it was “the work of Nazi Germany,” but through the Polish government’s persistent international appeals for the truth to be uncovered, during the Gorbachev era it was finally acknowledged as “Stalin’s crime.”
I would strongly recommend that His Excellency Galuzin read a wide range of history textbooks from around the world.