Paper short abstract:

This paper tries to address the unresolved questions regarding the 1956 Soviet-Japanese diplomatic normalization by utilizing newly available Japanese and other archival documents.

Paper long abstract:

The Soviet-Japanese Diplomatic Normalization in 1956 has attracted strong interests of scholars and pundits because of the significant yet unresolved issue that still hampers Japan-Russia relations today: the Northern Territories (hoppo ryodo) dispute. Scholars in Japan, Russia, and the world have uncovered the important facts regarding the process of the bilateral negotiations and the decision makings of Tokyo and Moscow by using effectively the limited Japanese and Russian archival documents, by discovering semi-archival materials, and by uncovering important U.S. and British archival documents. Nonetheless, several important aspects of the negotiations remain unknown or hotly debated.

This paper aims to address such unresolved questions by doing two things that have not been undertaken by the previous studies. First, unlike the previous studies of Soviet-Japanese negotiations leading to the normalization in 1956, this paper places Tokyo's handling of the negotiations in a broader perspective of Japan's multiple quests for the so-called independent foreign policy (jishu gaiko). The revelation of Japanese archival materials during the last decade or two shows that the Japanese government under Ichiro Hatoyama (1954-1956) pursued multiple "independent foreign policy" initiatives toward not only the Soviet Union, but also China and the United States. This paper examines how each of these initiatives interacted and influenced Tokyo's quest for Soviet-Japanese diplomatic normalization.

Second, this paper utilizes the archival documents that have been only recently classified or that have been undiscovered. The author has filed FOIA requests in the United States and obtained several important documents that, in the author's view, reveals previously unknown Tokyo's tactics of handing relations with Washington while seeking a breakthrough with Moscow. This finding is supplemented by the author's use of the newly available Japanese documents, declassified late last year (2019), that indirectly show how Tokyo tried to handle its relations with Washington and Moscow.

By doing these, this paper may be able to bring some debates on the Soviet-Japanese diplomatic normalization closer to resolution.