MOSCOW. Feb 21 (Interfax) - Moscow expressed annoyance with a statement by a Japanese government minister on Saturday in which he urged the Japanese public to be more persistent in demanding that four islands that were seized from Japan by the Soviet Union during World War II and are part of Russia today be returned under Japanese control.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano made his statement after a flight to the vicinity of the South Kuril Islands during which he looked at the islands, the source of a dispute between Tokyo and Moscow ever since the end of the war, with Japan refusing to sign a peace treaty with the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia without the islands returning under Japanese sovereignty.
"After his flight," the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a commentary, "Mr. Edano advocated a calm and serious dialogue on the peace treaty problem. This statement could have been hailed had it not been for statements that followed it. Their essence was that the Japanese people would have spoken on the co-called 'territorial problem' in a louder voice if it had come home to the Japanese how close to them the islands are situated."
"Obviously, what was in effect an appeal to the Japanese public to 'speak more loudly' on the so-called 'territorial issue' runs against Mr. Edano's preceding thesis about the calm nature of dialogue," the ministry said.
"The Russian side expects that Tokyo will, after all, overcome this duplicity, which can do nothing else that disorient public opinion, and will firmly and definitively opt for a truly calm discussion of the peace treaty problem, without any preconditions, unilateral historical linkages and demonstrative public relations actions, and against the background of intensive development of mutually advantageous Russian-Japanese cooperation," the commentary said.
Edano, who is also minister for the South Kuril islands, on Saturday arrived on Japan's Hokkaido island, from where he took his flight. He said he was also planning to meet during his two-day stay on Hokkaido with people who used to live on the South Kurils but were deported to Japan after Soviet troops pulled into the islands in 1945.
"The northern territories issue is a problem of not only former residents of the islands, but of the entire Japanese nation," English-language television channel Russia Today quoted Edano as telling a news conference in Tokyo. Edano said he would like to raise public awareness of the problem in his country.