Peace talks with Russia producing specific results - Japanese PM

TOKYO, January 22. /TASS/. Peace treaty talks with Russia have produced specific results, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said. "We can see that results are emerging, and it is wrong to say that talks are moving backwards," Abe pointed out, responding to a remark by leader of the Democratic Party for the People Yuichiro Tamaki, according to whom, there has been no progress in efforts to resolve the territorial dispute and the peace treaty issue. According to the Japanese prime minister, positive achievements include the first trial tour of the southern Kuril Islands, organized for Japanese tourists, and the fact that former residents of the islands were provided with an opportunity to visit areas they had not been allowed to enter before. At the same time, Abe stated that in Tokyo’s view, the "northern territories" [which is what Russia’s southern Kuril Islands are called in Japan - TASS] "come under Japan’s sovereignty" and "this position remains unchanged." He also emphasized that the Japanese government sought to determine the status of "all four islands" (Kunashir, Iturup, Shikotan and a group of islets called Habomai) and make a peace treaty based on that. "We will step up talks on the basis of the 1956 Joint Declaration, resolve the territorial dispute and sign a peace treaty," Abe said. Peace treaty issue Since the mid-20th century, Russia and Japan have been holding consultations in order to clinch a peace treaty as a follow-up to World War II. The Kuril Islands issue remains the sticking point since after WWII the islands were handed over to the Soviet Union while Japan laid claims to the four southern islands. In 1956, the two countries signed a joint declaration on ending the state of war and restoring diplomatic and all other relations, however, a peace treaty has still not been reached. Moscow has stated many times that Russia’s sovereignty over the islands cannot be called into question. On November 14, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held a meeting on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit in Singapore and agreed that the two countries would speed up peace treaty talks based on the 1956 declaration. The two countries’ foreign ministers, Sergey Lavrov and Taro Kono, oversee the negotiations conducted by their deputies, Igor Morgulov and Takeo Mori. The Joint Declaration said that the Soviet government was ready to hand Shikotan Island and a group of small islands over to Japan, adding that Tokyo would get actual control of the islands after a peace treaty was signed. However, after Japan and the United States had signed the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security in 1960, the Soviet Union withdrew its obligation to hand over the islands. A Soviet government’s memorandum dated January 27, 1960, said that those islands would only be handed over to Japan if all foreign troops were pulled out of the country. Read more