Japan is, rightly or wrongly, often portrayed as a homogenous country. Its territories are largely clearly defined, and its populace is virtually all Japanese-speaking.

A closer look at the land of the rising sun, however, reveals a very different picture about Japan.

Much has been written about the formation of the Japanese nation came at the expense of the indigenous Ainu (or Ezo) in the north, but tentative research is perhaps yet to be conducted on the plight of the Burakamin a major target of Japanese racism. That a search on www.google.com will not return much findings on the subject speaks for itself.

And, surprise surprise, Japan has its fair share of separatist movement too, although it is mostly confined to the Okinawans, and is yet to develop into the scales seen in Aceh, Sri Lanka, Tibet and Taiwan.

(Unlike certain right-wing, nationalistic Japanese politicians out to make Taiwan independence a diplomatic pawn against China, I have been conjecturing that the affinities of separatist Okinawans with independence-minded Taiwanese would take on a different dimension, as both groups of people are eager to wrest free from the dominance by a powerful nation and state.)

No different from other nations in the world, territorial integrity forms an important part of Japanese nationalism also, and Japan's diplomatic relations with the neighbouring countries are often plagued by territorial disputes. Tokyo is embroiled in an overlapping claim on jurisdiction over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands with China, and gets on the nerves of the Koreans, north and south alike, whenever it reiterates its sovereignty over the Takeshima/Dokko.

Recently, Japan's dispute with Russia over the Northern Territories, known in Russia as the Southern Kurils, has come to dominate the diplomatic relations between the two countries.

When Russia and Japan commemorated the centenary of the Russo-Japanese war in February last year, they did so with very different yet complex feelings.

So near yet so far

For the Russians, the war that took place in 1904 sounded alarm on the declining fortunes of the Czarist empire, as well as their first major defeat by a major yellow race power.

As far as Japan is concerned, its victory over a Caucasian giant marked the coming of age of a nation courting in rigour international recognition as a world power on par with the western imperialists - an ambition born with the pronouncement of the Meiji Restoration in 1868.

(Ironically, the war that involved the two powerful nations in Northeast Asia was in fact fought on Chinese and Korean soil. But long gone the days when one could send troops into foreign territories in the name of national interests?)

Tatsuya Koseki, a Japanese scholar in international affairs, once remarked that Russia, not China or Korea, is the country that seems so near yet so far to Japan. He cannot be more succinct.

The nostalgic significance of the Russo-Japanese war for right-wing Japanese can be seen in the effort by some in Japan to portray the victory over the Russians as the first step made by the Japanese to liberate the Asian nations under western colonialism at that time. (Such view is, no doubt, insulting to Asians, but it finds a listening ear in some Malay audience in Malaysia nonetheless. This is an issue that I will seek to address in near future.)

It is no secret that Japan is eager to improve its bilateral ties with Russia in recent years, and to take them to greater heights if at all possible. But the Gordian knot between the two countries remains uncut, which resolves around the dispute claim over the Kuril islands.

No clear solution

If historical documents are anything to go by, Russia appears to have an upper hand over the issue. Russian exploration of the Kuril archipelago began in the 1690s, some half a century before the Japanese set foot on the southern Kurils. However, Japan gave up its control over the southern portion of the Sakhalin Peninsula (Karafuto/Ku Ye Dao) in exchange for the possession of the entire chain of the Kurils in 1875 with Russia.

In August 1945, the United States and the United Kingdom agreed at Yalta to return the Kurils to Russia, but left out a definite and clear-cut solution with regard to the sovereignty of the four islands: Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan and Habomai. The move was to secure Russia's declaration of war on Japan.

After the Second World War, Japan renounced its occupied territories under the 1951 San Francisco Treaty, including the claim to the Kurils. However, it goes around legal hurdles by stating that the Northern Territories were never part of the Kuril Islands (Chishima retto as known in Japan). The Soviet Union, meanwhile, showed its concession by agreeing to return Shikotan island and the uninhabited Habomai group of islets according to the Soviet-Japan Joint Declaration of 1956.

When the US and Japan reached a security pact in the 1960s, the Soviets reneged on the Joint Declaration. It was not until 2001 that Russia, the successor state to the Soviet Union, recognised its validity. In November last year, President Vladimir Putin gave the clearest signs ever by announcing that Russia was ready to negotiate the return of the two islands to Japan.

Japan visit

But the overture by Putin has not gone down well with the Russians. On Feb 7, a protest was held outside the Japanese consulate general in the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in the Russian Far Eastern island of Sakhalin against a possible return of the two Kuril islands. The choice of the date has clearly been deliberate: Tokyo designated Feb 7 the Day of the Northern Territories in the early 2004.

Given Japan's flat rejection of the offer and the rising discontent within the country, Putin now has to agonise over his planned visit to Japan this year.

Given the potential rich natural gas reserves and the strategic values of the Kurils, it is incredulous that Moscow will cave in to the demand by Tokyo that all of the four islands be returned. Putin has clearly drawn his bottom line with the '2 + 2' solution: take it or leave it.

A century has passed since the Russo-Japanese war ended, but it would appear that the two countries are still fighting over the spoils of war. The physical distance between the two countries is close indeed, but a consensus on the dispute over the Kurils seems light years away still. How will the bicentenary of the Russo-Japanese War be commemorated in 2104?