The Soviet–Japanese Basic Convention

On 20 January 1925, in Beijing, the Japanese minister to China, Kenkichi Yoshizawa, and the Soviet ambassador to China, Lev Karakhan, signed a convention embodying the basic rules of relations between Japan and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Its text, drawn up in English, is known for short as the Soviet–Japanese Basic Convention, and in Russian literature as the Treaty of Peking. The convention established diplomatic and consular relations between two states that since 1918 had in practice been waging an undeclared war on each other. Japan undertook to withdraw its troops from the northern part of Sakhalin, which it had occupied in 1920, and in return received the right to exploit half of the island’s oil deposits. The Soviet Union accepted that the Treaty of Portsmouth, by which Russia had lost its war with Japan, remained in full force. It was the last of the great recognitions of the USSR in the mid-1920s, and for several years it stabilised the situation in the Far East, where the interests of the two powers had clashed for thirty years.

The long shadow of intervention

After the October Revolution, Japan became the most heavily engaged participant in the intervention in Russia. In August 1918 the government of Prime Minister Masatake Terauchi sent troops to the Russian Far East as part of the Siberian Intervention, officially to support the Czechoslovak Legion. At its peak more than 70,000 Japanese soldiers were stationed there, far more than had been agreed with the Americans. Some Japanese officers hoped to create a buffer state on the Pacific dependent on Tokyo, and business conglomerates wanted access to Siberia’s fish, timber and minerals.

In the spring of 1920 Red partisans under Yakov Tryapitsyn, having taken Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, massacred the Japanese garrison and the Japanese colony there, as well as thousands of the town’s Russian inhabitants. Several hundred Japanese were killed – the figure most often given is about 700 soldiers and civilians, among them the consul. The government in Tokyo responded by occupying the northern part of Sakhalin, which had remained Russian since the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905. In April 1920 Japanese troops landed at Aleksandrovsk, and in the summer Tokyo announced that it would occupy the island as a pledge until a legitimate Russian government gave satisfaction for Nikolayevsk. Japan, which after the war with Russia had received only the southern, oil-less half of Sakhalin, also had an economic interest in this. In the north of the island, around Okha, lay oil deposits, and the Imperial Japanese Navy, which was switching from coal to oil fuel, was looking for sources of oil independent of the United States. In 1919 Japanese firms, among them Mitsubishi, formed the Hokushinkai consortium to exploit them.

In October 1922, after years of costly intervention that was unpopular at home, the Japanese left Vladivostok. The Far Eastern Republic, a buffer created by Moscow, was soon absorbed by Soviet Russia, and on 30 December 1922 the USSR came into being. Japanese troops, however, remained in northern Sakhalin, which Tokyo was not prepared to give up for nothing. Negotiations at Dairen in 1921–1922 and at Changchun in September 1922 ended in failure. Tokyo demanded, among other things, an 80-year lease of northern Sakhalin, while Moscow demanded evacuation first and talks afterwards.

Joffe in Japan

The first step towards an agreement was taken by Shinpei Gotō, former president of the South Manchuria Railway and foreign minister, and until 1923 mayor of Tokyo. He believed that Japan, isolated after the Washington Conference, which had ended its alliance with Britain, needed good relations with Russia to defend its position in Manchuria and China. In defiance of the right, he invited to Japan the Soviet diplomat Adolph Joffe, who had just signed a declaration with Sun Yat-sen in Shanghai. Joffe arrived in February 1923, took a cure at Atami and held talks with Gotō, at first unofficial. There was even talk of selling northern Sakhalin to Japan. Moscow wanted at least a billion gold roubles; the Japanese offered 150 million yen. In the summer of 1923 the talks collapsed, but each side now knew what the other wanted.

The events of 1924 decided the resumption of negotiations. In February the USSR was recognised by Britain and Italy, in May by China and in the autumn by France. Japan risked becoming the only great power apart from the United States without relations with Moscow – and at a time when Soviet influence in China was growing. The Soviet authorities also reminded Tokyo of their leverage: on 13 February 1924 they informed the Japanese consul in Vladivostok that henceforth they would treat him as a private individual. The lack of relations was increasingly harmful to Japanese fishermen in Russian waters and to merchants in the ports on the Sea of Japan. Moscow, for its part, wanted Japan to stop supporting the White émigrés in Manchuria and to leave Sakhalin.

The negotiations in Beijing

Official talks began in Beijing on 14 May 1924. They were conducted by Yoshizawa, the Japanese minister to the Chinese government, and Karakhan, the Soviet representative in China since 1923, who on 31 May 1924 signed an agreement with the Beijing government establishing Sino-Soviet relations. On the Japanese side, the negotiations were overseen from June 1924 by Foreign Minister Kijūrō Shidehara of Takaaki Katō’s government. Shidehara was an advocate of peaceful, economic expansion and co-operation with the powers, and the agreement with Moscow was one of the first tests of his policy.

Three issues proved the hardest: Portsmouth, Nikolayevsk and oil. Japan demanded recognition of the 1905 treaty, which underpinned its position in Korea, southern Manchuria and southern Sakhalin. Moscow, which had proclaimed its break with the “imperialist” treaties of tsarism, did not want to be seen endorsing it. Japan wanted an apology and satisfaction for Nikolayevsk. The longest dispute was over the share of the deposits in northern Sakhalin. The Japanese navy demanded 60 per cent of the oilfield area; the Russians offered 40, then 45. In the end the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s proposal – half – was adopted. According to Japanese scholars, Moscow gave way because it wanted to sign the agreement before the first anniversary of Lenin’s death.

What was agreed

The convention had seven articles. It was accompanied by two protocols, a declaration by the Soviet government and an exchange of notes.

• The parties established diplomatic and consular relations.
• The USSR agreed that the Treaty of Portsmouth of 5 September 1905 remained in full force. The other treaties, conventions and agreements concluded by Japan and Russia before 7 November 1917 were to be reviewed at a separate conference and revised or annulled.
• The parties were to revise the fisheries convention of 1907, and in the meantime the Japanese were to lease fishing grounds on the terms in force in 1924.
• Both sides undertook to conclude a commercial treaty and to treat each other on terms close to most-favoured-nation status.
• Article 5 bound both governments to refrain from any action, open or covert, that might threaten order in the other’s state, including through persons and organisations in receipt of state funds. Neither side was to tolerate on its territory groups claiming to be the government of any part of the other’s territory. For Japan this meant a ban on Comintern propaganda; for the USSR, the end of Japanese patronage of White émigré governments.
• Article 6 provided that the USSR, taking account of Japan’s needs for raw materials, would grant Japanese citizens and firms concessions for minerals, forests and other natural resources throughout its territory.

Protocol A settled the most important practical question. Japanese troops were to leave northern Sakhalin completely by 15 May 1925, and the evacuated areas were to revert immediately to full Soviet sovereignty. The parties also declared that neither had an alliance or secret agreement with a third state threatening the other. The questions of tsarist debts and claims were left for future negotiations. Protocol B set out the terms of the concessions. Japanese firms nominated by their government were to receive half the area of each of the oilfields in northern Sakhalin, divided into squares like a chessboard, the right to prospect on the island’s east coast and coal concessions on its west coast. The concessions were to run for 40 to 50 years, and the Japanese were to pay the Soviet state between 5 and 15 per cent of the oil extracted, and as much as 45 per cent from gushing wells. The concession contracts were to be signed within five months of the evacuation.

Karakhan also made a declaration that recognition of the Treaty of Portsmouth did not mean that the Soviet government shared with the former tsarist government political responsibility for concluding it. This formula allowed Moscow to save face. The Nikolayevsk question was closed by a short note in which Karakhan expressed “sincere regret” over the events of 1920 without accepting responsibility for them. Japan waived compensation, since the Sakhalin concessions took its place.

Implementation

The USSR ratified the convention on 20 February and Japan on 25 February 1925. It came into force the following day, and the formal exchange of ratifications took place in Beijing on 15 April. The first Soviet representative, Victor Kopp, arrived in Tokyo, and a Japanese ambassador in Moscow. In May 1925 Japanese troops left northern Sakhalin, and on 15 May, the deadline set in the protocol, it was handed over to the Soviet authorities. More than 2,500 people left the island for Japan at that time. After long negotiations in Moscow an oil agreement was signed on 14 December 1925, and in 1926 the North Sakhalin Oil Company (Kita Karafuto Sekiyu) was founded; for almost twenty years it extracted oil at Okha and exported it to Japan, mainly for the navy. In January 1928 a new fisheries convention was signed. Gotō travelled to Moscow at that time and spoke with Stalin.

Within Japan itself, the agreement with Moscow had another side. In the spring of 1925 the same Katō government steered through parliament a law granting universal male suffrage and the Peace Preservation Law, which laid down severe penalties for activity aimed at changing the imperial system of government or abolishing private property. The authorities feared that establishing relations with the USSR would open the door to Communist propaganda. In the following years the law became the main instrument for persecuting not only Communists but all opposition to militarism.

Significance

The Beijing convention did not bring friendship, but it gave both sides several years of calm. Japan regained economic influence in the Russian Far East without troops, and the USSR recovered all its territory and secured its rear at a time when it was becoming involved in China. Mutual distrust remained. The Japanese army, especially the Kwantung Army in Manchuria, regarded the USSR as its main adversary, while Soviet intelligence and the Comintern worked against Japan in China.

The calm ended in 1931, when the Kwantung Army seized Manchuria and created Manchukuo. From then on the USSR and Japan shared a border thousands of kilometres long. In 1936 Japan concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany, and in 1938–1939 the two countries’ forces clashed at Lake Khasan and at Khalkhin Gol, where the Japanese suffered defeat. That defeat prompted Tokyo to turn south, towards the European colonies and war with America. On 13 April 1941 Japan and the USSR concluded a neutrality pact in Moscow, sometimes described as a non-aggression pact. The Japanese promised at the same time to give up the Sakhalin concessions, which they did only on 30 March 1944, when the course of the war had turned decisively in Moscow’s favour.

The last act of this story came in August 1945. In accordance with the promise made to the Allies at Yalta, the USSR declared war on Japan and occupied Manchuria, southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. The Treaty of Portsmouth, which Moscow had recognised as binding in 1925, was thus annulled by force, and the whole of Sakhalin became part of the Soviet Union.