For over 40 years now, the ritual has been the same. Each new Japanese administration resolves firmly that it will solve Japan's festering territorial dispute with Moscow, once and for all. Delegations and prime ministers visit Moscow. And each time the results are zero.
The present administration of Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi is no exception. It inherited an alleged promise by Russian President Boris Yeltsin to former Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto to solve the dispute by the year 2000. Now, it seems, Japan has yet another year 2,000 problem: Yeltsin's promise was meaningless, if it ever even existed. So there will be no solution to the so-called Northern Territories problem and therefore no formal peace treaty to end a long-ago war with the Soviet Union.
Some background is needed to understand how Tokyo got into this mess. At the January 1945 Yalta Conference, and in exchange for a Soviet pledge to attack Japan, the United States promised Moscow that it could take control of former Russian territories lost to Japan. These included the Kuril Island archipelago, whose southern end (which Japan today calls the Northern Territories) consists of three large islands -- Etorufu, Kunashiri and Shikotan -- plus a group of small islands very close to Hokkaido known as the Habomais.