Kurile islands
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The Kuril (or Kurile) Islands are presently part of Russia's Sakhalin Oblast stretch northeast from Hokkaidō, Japan, to Kamchatka, separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the North Pacific Ocean. Japan claims the sounthern most of the Kurile islands. The islands are known in Japanese as the Chishima Islands Kanji: 千島列島 / Hepburn Romaji: Chishima rettō
Kuril comes from "kur," meaning "man"" in the language if the first known inhabitants of the Kuriles, as well as Hokkaido and Sakhalin island, the Ainu. These presumed aboriginal inhabitants were expelled from the northernmost by the Russians in the 18th century. Japan assumed formal sovereignty under international law in the 1875 (Treaty of Saint Petersburg) in exchange for ceding Sakhalin to Russia. The Japanese had long considered the Kuriles and Sakhalin as Japanese territory, its as yet largely unsettled northern frontier.
The Soviet Union seized the islands after the World War II and codief ed the land grab in the (Treaty of San Francisco), but Japan maintains a claim to the four southernmost islands, called Northern Territories in Japan (see Kuril Island conflict). This seizure was contemporanious with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's movement of Poland hundreds of miles to the west and carving Moldova out of the territory of Romania.
The Kuril Islands form a volcanic island arc as a result of plate tectonics. The Kuril Trench is an oceanic trench that runs about 200 km east of the Kuril Islands. The islands themselves are summits of stratovolcanoes that rise from the seabed.
The islands are renowned for their fogginess, but are rich in seaweed and marine life, such as fish and otters. The northernmost, Atlasov Island (Oyakoba to the Japanese), is an almost perfect volcanic cone rising sheer out of the sea, and has led to many Japanese eulogies in haiku, wood-block prints, etc., extolling its beauty, much as they do the more well-known Mt. Fuji.
Japanese sources refer to the Kuriles as early as the 14th century. While in Russian sources the islands are mentioned for the first time in 1646, the earliest detailed information about them was provided by the explorer Vladimir Atlasov in 1697. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the Kurils were explored by Danila Antsiferov, I.Kozyrevsky, Ivan Yevreinov, Fyodor Luzhin, Martin Shpanberg, Adam Johann von Krusenstern, and Vasily Golovnin.
In Janurary 1993, Russian wingnut politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky responded to Japanese offers to renegotiate the return of Kuriles to Japanese sovereignty with the following comments: "I would bomb the Japanese. I would sail our large navy around their small island, and if they so much as cheeped, I would nuke them..."
External links
References
- Richard Connaughton. 1988, 1991, 2003. Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear: Russia's War with Japan. London: Cassell. ISBN 0304366579.
- Graham Frazer and George Lancelle. 1994. Absolute Zhirinovsky: A Transparent View of the Distinguished Russian Statesman. New York: Penguin. ISBN 0140243399.
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