The description in the 2022 Diplomatic Blue Book, an annual report on Japan’s foreign policy issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, uses this language for the first time in nearly two decades.
Japan, which has struggled to improve relations with Russia to regain control of the Kuril Islands, which Tokyo calls the Northern Territories, has previously described the dispute in a softer tone.
“The Northern Territories are a group of islands over which Japan has sovereignty and which are an integral part of Japan’s territory, but are currently illegally occupied by Russia,” the ministry said in the report.
The dispute over the Russian-controlled islands, which the former Soviet Union seized from Japan at the end of World War II, prevented the two countries from signing a peace treaty officially ending hostilities between them.
The report last used a similar expression in 2003, but then softened the language until last year, when it described the dispute as “the greatest concern between Japan and Russia” and noted that “Japan has sovereignty” over the islands.
In another territorial dispute, the ministry said the island, which Japan calls Takeshima, is “illegally occupied” by South Korea, which it calls Dokdo.
South Korea’s foreign ministry protested Japan’s “repeated inclusion of unfair claims on Dokdo’s sovereignty,” describing the island as an inalienable part of South Korea’s territory.
It said Tokyo’s repeated allegations were “in no way conducive to efforts to establish a future-oriented relationship between the two sides”.
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