JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION
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- English Instructor (Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe)
- Berlitz Japan, Inc. (ベルリッツ・ジャパン株式会社), Kansai
- Salary: ¥125,000 ~ ¥250,000 / Month
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- FT English Teachers for Kids - Osaka
- Kohgakusha Co., Ltd. （株式会社興学社）, Osaka
- Salary: ¥255,000 ~ ¥275,000 / Month Travel Expenses, Encouragement of Japanese learning*
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- Translator
- ZAIHON, Inc. (日本財務翻訳株式会社), Tokyo
- Salary: ¥6.0M / Year Negotiable
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Brunobear
The reason why Americans fear Socialism is because from the very start they developed a severe cultural distaste for paying taxes. That is why they went to war against Britain. It was over a tiny little tax to assist mother Britain fund a war against hostile France at the time. Their was nothing heroic in the Boston Tea Party or the War of Independence in 1776. Australia started off as a British colony in 1778 and like the early US was heavily subsidized by the British. Every request Australia made to Britain for self government was always promptly approved. A decade ago we voted overwhelmingly to reject a Rupublic and remain a Constitutional Mornarchy with the "Queen" as out head. A wonderful system that has made us the wealthiest and freest people on earth.
We started the eight hour day and numerous social reforms as far back as the nineteenth century. 96% of Australians have voted at every Federal election since 1926 because it is compulsory. That means all Australians take a real interest in public policy. We don't have self serving lobbyists distorting our development as the US does.
We have had a fabulous publicly funded health system since 1975. No one in Australia fears losing their savings or their home if the get sick. There are very few law suits against the medical profession. Melbourne has the best hospitals, medical research and doctors in the world and you get treated free! The most serious always go straight to the head of the line. People bitch because they have to wait 12 weeks for a free hip operation. We attract the best medical brains in the world here!
We took the future of our medical system out of the hands of the doctors in the 1970's and put it into the hands of health professionals and the Parliament. Our health drug system ensures people get access to the best drugs at a very competitive price and effectively free for the less wealthy.
Australians if given a choice between a tax cut or better public services, will take the latter every time. They go for practicable things and are not trembling in false fear of silly labels like "socialism". It is just a word, and a word that hardly gets mentioned here. FEAR is an acronym for "false evidence appearing real".
America is almost broke now it is drowning in $13 trillion of the giantist "ponzie" scheme of all time. Federal "Public Debt" is so big in the US it cannot even service the interest on it for goodness sake. Australia on the other hand is just going into a "minute" amount of public debt to assist its people from suffering from the world financial crisis started in the US. Our economy is actually now out of the financial crisis and doing very well.
Like most "Aussies", I really love America and Americans. They are on the whole great people and the greatest force for good of all time in the world. We are forever grateful for what our big US brother has done for us . But guys you Americans have an elite that only looks after the elite and that is bad for your Society. Our elite and Parliament put the interest of the whole society first. We have never had a national leader sacked for improprietry or accused of not putting the whole nations interests first. We would demand sacking of a PM if he was late returning a library book!
We have learned a lot from the US, but now the US population might have a look across the Pacific and see what why its little brother down under is doing so well and abandon those stupid self destructive labels.
Obama is a great force for good in the World. Wed could show him how to solve America's financial, health and democracy problems in a few days.
Posted in: Republicans accuse Obama of socialism
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Brunobear
Triumvere: Derrrr!
Posted in: Madoff ordered to forfeit over $170 billion
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Brunobear
If you read the 600 page official court list of Madoff clients, they almost to as person had Jewish sounding names. Eye for an eye with them!
If they had have have been Christian, they may have been prepared to "turn the other cheek' as it were, and let him off and give him a chance to do it to them again with a suspended sentence.
Interestingly Madoff's chosen list of clients thought they were getting a remarkable fixed 20% per annum exponential growth, year after year, though the rest of the market was going up and down like a roller coaster. Seems they deserved the outcome from being so stupid and greedy.
Madoff should get an award for proving how gullible people are when it comes to money. But then didn't some NY politically correct fancy pants liberal group have the word "gullible" removed from the Oxford dictionary claiming it may have racist, sexist, insulting or particular culture overtones. Perhaps they will have to reinstate it.
Then what about the chiefs and boards of the big NY based banks, investment banks and rating agencies for their giant "securitized" ponzi scheme. 1000 years gaol for them I expect. Then we can have a look at the lunatic US Federal Reserve Board also based in NY. I would give the a couple of thousand years each for their daddy of them all Government bond Ponzi scheme with US$12 trillion (90% of US GDP) in "risk free" public debt. Then we may as well go all they way and go for the Japanese Central Bank with their US$8 trillion of public debt - a Ponzi scheme twice Japans GDP and twice as serious as that in the US. And President Obama talks of closing down Guantanoma Bay - he is going to need a couple more at least. I have to go, their is a surviving "financial planner" on TV giving advice. I think he is only alive because of a life support system. His face seems to be covered in bandages and blood!
Posted in: Madoff ordered to forfeit over $170 billion
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Brunobear
ninjaninaritai: You are right in the first point being a false dilemma because you know that no one else other than aging Japanese and a few isolated eskimo's wants to eat whale meat. And of course a few company men zealots. If the rest of the world wanted to eat it instead of the delinquint Icelandic and Norwegian whale fisherman selling their whole modest whale catch to Japan to go into long term cold storage, they would sell it to the rest of the world. But no one else is buying! The third point I stand by because what I read, young Japanese won't touch the stuff. The world youth culture is strongly against whaling as is Japanese youth. The only thing cool about whale meat is the freezers your a forced to accumulate it in. You and your fellow zealots should read President Woodrow Wilson's 1918, 14 points for peace, to end world conflict, which has largely been adopted throughout the world. Japan thumbed their then brutal nose at them, until the world stepped in and sorted Japan out in the forties. Japan needs to make sacrifices to, to get along with the rest of us. World opinion is against you on whaling. But the world would support Japan if it moved to a completely sustainable whale watching industry and would watch you bathe in the cash.You might even develop an artificial "marsh mallow" soft whale meat that aging Japanese could sink their dentures into.
Posted in: Japan whaling town gets season's first catch
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Brunobear
Davidattokyo: Uncommon sense says that if the rest of the world decided to eat whale meat in preference to farmed animal meat, then whales would not last more than a few years.
Whale watching would be consigned to plastic mock ups in concrete museums and whale eating would be something you read about in the concrete library in history books.
With all your profound knowledge about whales and their demise, you would probably sell a lot of books describing what they used to be like, and who to blame for their disappearance.
The fact is though, that the rest of the world just doesn't want to eat them, only some Japanese pre-decomposers. The youth of Japan will toss the whaling policy out within a few years and join an enlightened age of the western peers. The dogs will bark and the caravan will move on!
Posted in: Japan whaling town gets season's first catch
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Brunobear
Davidattokyo: The reason we are not having the wars we did before 1945 is because we can use artificial fertilizers to massively increase high protean food and feed most of 6.5 billion people or more. How long do you think whales would last if the world decided to eat them first and farmed animals second? When I was a child in the fifties you had chicken once a year because it was a scarce resource used mainly for egg production. Today, you can afford to eat it for three meals a day or more and it is available in great abundance. As is high quality beef,sheep, goat, pig and even kangaroo because they are in abundance and we can prove it, but not Koala or Platypus. Some Aussie aborigine might use your arguments of eating sustainable wildlife and as a traditional way of life, but fortunately our so-called primitive aborigines understand the word scarcity and respect our laws on protection of Australian wildlife. They also respect the views that come from the countries that guarantee Japan's, Australia and most of the world's freedom, the US and Britain. Mate, take up whale watching like the rest of us and have a hamburger for lunch on the boat or a chicken sandwich while you admire these harmless, magnificent creatures. Hopefully, you can organize Japan to become a major whale watching location for China, India and Japan. Imagine the Yuan's, Yen's and Rupee's. The Japanese businesses involved would never be able to count it all in ten life times, you duffers.
Posted in: Japan whaling town gets season's first catch
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Brunobear
Davidattokyo: I don't imagine you get invited to many dinner parties? Your arguments are those of a zealot and lack any modicum of reality. For example, You say if wild resources are available they should be used, rather than resorting to unnatural destruction farming practices. The only reason we have 6.5 billion people on this planet in 2009 is because a century ago a German scientist invented artificial fertilizers! Without them the world would be unable to feed even a third of that number including eating everything wild man could get in his mouth. There would be continuous warring over food resources. The fact that we learned to use artificial means of producing abundant hy protein food and freed us up for more intellectual pursuits is probably why all of us commentators are alive and here to use 'Japan Today' to intellectualize on the world and its future. The world is a stunningly beautiful place and its various forms of life the same. We should do the least of amount of harm we can to the natural world, now we are in the scientific age. To be frank, no one trusts Japan on its exploitation of natural resources. Are you actually a real person or a 1970's Japanese computer program?
Posted in: Japan whaling town gets season's first catch
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Brunobear
Moderator: If there are other media reports that Aso Mining Co officials will now see 88 year old POW, Mr Coombes, may we have that reported in JT for our edification?
Posted in: How do you feel about the call by some World War II POWs for Prime Minister Taro Aso to apologize and offer reparation over their wartime forced labor at a coalmine owned by his father?
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Brunobear
A German town recently refused the construction of a mosque because the Islamic architecture did not fit with historic buildings it would be set among, and also because the town leadership would not accept a major building in their town where women were not treated as an equal.
Wearing of these outfits in some Middle Eastern countries like Egypt only became widespread after the 1967 Israeli/Egyption war when secularism was swamped by the old bastion of religion.
In Turkey I have seen groups of women wearing them for vital sun protection in the fields while their husbands sat around all day in the village playing cards.
Roman Catholics nuns gave their similar garb away in the sixties.
Shiria law does not require the cutting off of hands for stealing or the the public spectacle of stoning women for unfaithfulness if the accused publicly repents. But it is widely done whether the accused repent or not.
Moslem women in France are better off to adopt the truism "when in Rome, do as the Romans do". Same with their men folk.
Posted in: Sarkozy says burqas are 'not welcome' in France
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Brunobear
abromofo: Thank you for your advice. Australians are very forgiving people and I would bet London to a brick that is what really drives Mr Coombes.
This action by officials of Aso Corporation might go a long way in healing old wounds before this 88 year old man dies. It could be good for Aso Mining Company, the Aso family, Mr Coombes and any remaining comrades.
By the way I am 64 and have lived in Melbourne all my life. I never hear of anybody talking about hating the Japanese, except by some old POW's. We might hate the events and behavior of WW11, that is another thing altogether.
Few Japanese immigrate here for some reason, but many come for a good holiday. Japanese people are very welcome in Australia. I used to train young Japanese trainee bankers in the seventies and they were all good guys. I also looked after all the Japanese Corporations that banked with my bank. We put on a great party for them every Xmas.
All is well that ends well.
If there is two countries in the world that could really benefit from each other, it is Australia and Japan.
Posted in: How do you feel about the call by some World War II POWs for Prime Minister Taro Aso to apologize and offer reparation over their wartime forced labor at a coalmine owned by his father?
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Brunobear
wibble: Yes, my close friends have had about fifteen Jewish people from around the globe they have never heard of making competing claims to their former Berlin Assets and they have just got something out of it in recent times. As I understand it, they are only concerning themselves with Jewish claims? Who is the Jewish community? I thought Jewish people were citizens of countries like everyone else during WW11 that signed that 1954 SF agreement. Besides seeking to make recovery on pre-war assets, they also obtained substantial reparations (compensation)from Germany for their suffering. Who else received reparations?
I empathise with the Jews that suffered financially from Hitlers misdeeds and also Bernie Madoff's recently. If you look at the 600 page list of Madoff's investers, they were mainly Jews.
The point is whether Mr Coombes has a reasonable justification for asking that the Japanese Company that allegedly enslaved and brutalized him (and his 300 Allied comrades)should meet him and here his complaint. He was probably unaware that the Company continued to suuceesfully trade and prosper until recently, we don't get a lot of Japanese news in Australia unless you read JT. The same applies to the Jewish complainants. They would never have made their claims on their own without a huge Jewish diaspora orchestrating it for them and many are still being made. Do wrong and the world pays you back, sometimes it takes its time, but Aso Mining Company might be just being caught up with by the world.
Moderator: Stay on topic please. References and comparisons to Jewish complainants are not relevant to this particular discussion.
Posted in: How do you feel about the call by some World War II POWs for Prime Minister Taro Aso to apologize and offer reparation over their wartime forced labor at a coalmine owned by his father?
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Brunobear
LFRAgain "As if the suffering of one were somehow more worthy of special dispensation than others". I thought that was the purpose of my comment and I used the Jewish example of continuous claims for compensation and still chasing down 95 year old alleged war criminals for war crimes 64 years after the war was over. The crimes visited on them were evil but no more evil than on the other 94 million who died and perhaps another 200 million who suffered but survived. This is not a situation of arguing about the merits of who suffered the most as you seem to be making it, nor a call for endless claims for compensation as the Jewish diaspora do. Good on them! It is about an 88 year old Australian POW who was allegedly brutally treated wile working as slave labor at a Japanese mining company in 1945 seeking to bring his bitter memories to the Company's current leadership. There is no class action by anyone as you well know. You show him no respect at all!
Posted in: How do you feel about the call by some World War II POWs for Prime Minister Taro Aso to apologize and offer reparation over their wartime forced labor at a coalmine owned by his father?
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Brunobear
Aso Mining Company is the culprit and as a corporation lives in perpetuity.
Mr Coombes, the 88 year old Australia POW is probably the last survivor of the 300 POW slaves at Aso Mining Company during WW11. When he dies, Aso Mining Company won't have to worry anymore of the corporate embarrassment the Company indulged in in 1944/5. But he and some mates in Melbourne bought it to the public's attention last Anzac day.
I love they way your armchair experts who have never been within cooee of the misery that brave old diggers like Mr Coombes suffered under a brutal captivity regime do a Judge Judy and "tell him to get over it".
The 1954 Treaty of San Francisco was executed when Japan was still in poverty from the Pacific war it started. Within decades, Japan would become the second most powerful economy within decades from the help of the forgiving allied powers. Presumably Aso Mining Company did well out out of the War and the Marshall Plan after.
We can accept that no one employed at Aso Mining Company in the thirties had any say in starting the Pacific war, or even currently working in it still, participated.
The point is the Aso Mining Company treated these POW's slaves with brutality and it is the Company, Aso Mining Company, that needs to consider an apology to, Australian, Mr Coombes. When you lift the corporate veil on Aso Mining Company, you find the Aso family. The whole world will know about this soon because Aso and his brother were too stupid to treat these men in 2009 with some respect and dignity when the opportunity was presented.
As I have said in other blogs, if it okay for the international Jewish diaspora to not get over it, and raise the plight of Jews who suffered under the Nazi's, 365 days a year for the last 64 years and continue to make daily demands for compensation, and chase down those who brutalized Jews, build museums to it in all major Christian cities and present real life sufferers, why not let heroic Mr Coombes, face the Company that brutalized him. As we age, the wrongs that were done to us don't evaporate, your long memory becomes stronger than your recent.
Just show the dear old soldier some respect you wimps.
Posted in: How do you feel about the call by some World War II POWs for Prime Minister Taro Aso to apologize and offer reparation over their wartime forced labor at a coalmine owned by his father?
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Brunobear
Israel was started on a bad premise. It was born out of Jewish terrorism against the UN sanctioned British administration of Palestine. Israel was not the Zionists first choice of a Jewish homeland. A section of northern Australia was their first choice, but it was rejected by Australia as were requests to other countries. So they got a bit of arid waterless land where Jews lived two thousand years before, but not in the interim, and had to displace the Palestinian Arabs that had two thousand years of continuous occupation. They stole the Palestinians land, they are now stealing all their precious water via the Israeli military occupied West bank. Gaza is a concentration camp on any measure. There are another 300,000 Palestinian long term refugees in camps in northern Israel.
Does Israel get on with its neighbors? No! Is Israel are viable economic entity? No! Is Israel at permanent threat of nuclear attack from a hostile neighbor? Yes! If all Jews lived in Israel today, would it mean the whole culture would be at risk of mass destruction and oblivion? Yes!. Has Israel proved to be the new promised land for Jewish safety, and peace? No!
Do the Western protestant countries such as the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Britain offer the best prospect of a realistic promised land to the Jews, where they will mic and live in peace, economically advance and can practice their religion freely and they will be defended by their neighbors? Yes!
The whole Zionist campaign over the past 130 years has been an exercise in stupidity. Historically, Jews in Palestine have an ancient history of being slaughtered by invaders. But then, they always seem have a need to prove their Jewishness and continuously tell the world, how we all hate them. The place should be abandoned by Jews and given back to the Arabs if even a modicum of commonsense was to prevail. Then we might at last get this tiny little irrelevant country of the front pages of our papers everyday and improve the prospects of peace in the world.
Moderator: No history lessons please. Focus your comments on what is in the story.
Posted in: Israel: Palestinians use settlements as excuse to avoid peace talks
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Brunobear
In the year 70AD the historic "Holocaust Temple" in Jerusalem was demolished by a fed up Roman Army on the orders of Rome and the whole 600,000 Jewish population in Israel was then slaughtered. That ended Jewish occupation in Palestine for effectively almost two thousand years. In the nineteenth century, the only Jews in Palestine were enough to support old orthodox Jews who returned to their ancient holy land to die. Even at the end of WW1 there was only 56,000 amongst an Arab population of over 1 million. Failing to get a Jewish homeland in Australia and several other places in the forties, Judism eventually had to accept part of Palestine as a last choice. Then it seems they resurrected the word "Holocaust" from the destroyed "Holocaust Temple" of 70AD to describe the more recent slaughter committed by the Nazi's and claimed 6 million died - 10 times that of the original slaughter. I don't know if the number is true or not, but I accept it was a lot more than the original 600,000 of 70AD. That is not the real issue here.
I cannot imagine that it was envisaged by the new UN in 1948 that in granting a small Jewish homeland in Palestine in a tiny arid almost waterless sector of Palestine, with few natural assets, it would become the focus of perpetual Jewish violent conflict with the 1 million plus existing Arab inhabitants and neighbors, a source of major instability in the region, and be flooded by seven million Jews with over the next four decades. Tiny arid Israel is now bulging at the sides, yet in am act of blind folly, it still calls for the world's remaining 7 million Jews to also immigrate to Israel.
But for the Jews in the real and sensible Jewish "promised land", the United States of America, artificially propping them up, Israel and its anxious population could not economically survive and never will.
Israel needs the extra space and the underground water in the West Bank or it runs out of water. They are literally stealing it from the Palestinians leaving the Palestinians virtually nothing to drink but contaminated remnants. It is not that a few Jewish settlers slipped over the boundary into the Westbank in error, it has been Israeli state policy in contempt of numerous UN resolutions not to, to relocate the hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers living there and it continues at a massive rate. Dispossession of Arabs is therefore State policy.
It was the fraudulent 1967 War against Egypt that became the ruse to expand into Arab lands, and it alone was the cause of the radicalism of Islam throughout the Middle East that followed; at the expense of the West as a whole. The later Arab terrorist tactics of lethal car-bombings and the mass carnage they deliver, was copied from the same tactics the Jewish settler groups visited on the UN sanctioned British administration of Palestine in the forties.
Of course the Palestinians should no longer negotiate, when it is obvious the Israeli's are applying the "Phylosophy of Gradualism" to keep expanding. The adopt the same irritating selfish behavior that upset the Romans to their detriment in 70AD. The Torah has chapters on how you should treat your slaves, and that is where the Palestinians will finish up if the keep just copping it.
Negotiations must be on the basis of utmost good faith. It seems President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton can see through the deception. The world would have been a better and safer place if the the UN had never approved a Jewish homeland there. The promise land for the Jews is the Christian West.
Posted in: Israel: Palestinians use settlements as excuse to avoid peace talks
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Brunobear
It was exciting until the ad's finished and the game started. A snooze fest!
Too much off field hype and no sizzle with soccer matches.
Posted in: Australia downs Japan 2-1 to secure top spot in group for World Cup
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Brunobear
See it for what it is. Another step in the philosophy of Israeli gradualism. Offer something you don't intend on doing, and make further encroachments. Perhaps one day all Jews will live there on this tiny bit of parched land. They don't know how many Moslems states in the future will have nuclear weapons or the ability to access them in need. One nuclear bomb and they will be like the dinosaurs. A former people visible in only history books. The Romans wiped out all 600,000 Jews in Palestine in 70AD because they pushed them too far. It left Palestine basically almost bereft of Jews for another 1900 years. You know what they say about history. There is something insane and suicidal going on here in their "zealous" strategy of a doctrinaire promised land.They thought the same in 1917 in Russia. But they will prove their Jewishness. We will all be able to say, they gave it there best "shot".
Posted in: Netanyahu endorses demilitarized Palestinian state
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Brunobear
Japan might start acting honorably with the poor countries of the South Pacific and provide them with assistance to sustain them and not just drip feed them a few yen to get their vote on whaling. Japan has not yet learned that not only must it be a good citizen it must be abundantly seen to be a good citizen if it wants support to recover any of its former pre WW11 territories. It is highly unlikely it will get the islands on its present "we don't care what the world that has rebuilt us thinks" diplomacy. People of other nations have to want to give territory back. Japan is an insular country and wasted an abundance of opportunities over the past 40 years. To have a friend you have to be a friend!
Posted in: Should Russia return the four disputed islands off Hokkaido to Japan?
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Brunobear
blue monday: Australia's wealth lays in its multi dimesional market based and unsubsidised economy and it cerebral and industrious workforce. Over 55% of Australia's population are in the workforce which is high compared to other advanced economies. Yes we are well endowed with massive mineral and energy wealth. Where economies like ours go wrong is when the Central Bank beauracrats let credit growth run rampant and then start playing Russian roulette with interest rates finding any bizarre excuse to start pulling the levers. The price of money affects wealth creation and destruction. It encourages or destroys the incentive to invest in wealth creating assets. Their is a natural rate for interest as there is for return on diversified investments over the long term. jhk: You won't remember my JT comment next week let alone in a few months time. It is getting the monetary settings right that leads to wealth creation and improves the welfare of the people we both share concern about, and that is the vast majority. The hardest thing with wealth is hanging on to it.
Posted in: Japan can do without preaching on how to fix its economy
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Brunobear
mummet: The Kuril Islands extend 1,200 kms from the southern tip of Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia to the north eastern corner of Hokkaido, Japan and separate the Sea of Okhotsk from the Pacific Ocean. the 56 island cover 15,600 sq. km. The chain is part of the belt of geological instability circling the Pacific. The islands have at least 100 volcanoes of which 35 or so are still active and many hot springs, earthquakes and tidal waves are common. The climate of the islands is severe with long cold snowy winters and cool wet foggy summers. Vegetation ranges from tundra in the northern islands to dense forests on the larger southern islands. The only significant occupation is crab fishing. Some vegetables are grown on the southern islands.
The Kurils were originally settled by the Russians following their exploration in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1855 Japan seized the southern islands and in 1875 took possession of the entire chain.
In 1945 as part of the Yalta agreement the islands were ceded to the then Soviet Union and the Japanese population was repatriated and replaced by Soviets. Japan still claims historical rights to the four southern islands.
Japan has been the aggressor and must suffers the consequences when it was defeated. The Soviets however, did not fight Japan in WW11 as the US and its western allies did. They only declared war on Japan when the war was days from ending on 8 August 1945. Whether they actually invaded and took possession before Japan surrendered several days later, I don't know. But is seems Russia's claim comes from a prospective carve up of the spoils of war sorted out at between Britain, the US and the soviets at Yalta.
The decision should come down to a referendum by the mixed race inhabitants of the four disputed southern islands. The entitlements and responsibilities that Japan will deliver them if they vote to join Japan must be irrevocable and set out in the referendum documents.
I cannot imagine the Russians would agree but a poll of the inhabitants would be interesting.
Posted in: Should Russia return the four disputed islands off Hokkaido to Japan?