Within East Asian international politics, current Russo-Japanese relations are as complicated as Japan's relations with its immediate neighbors, Korea and China. The relations are fraught because they touch upon unresolved issues of memory and legacy of the Japanese empire, World War II in Asia, and the Cold War alliances that are still in place in the region. After all, Russia and Japan did not sign a peace treaty after the end of World War II, primarily because Japan disputes the Southern Kuril Islands and insists that a peace treaty is conditioned upon the transfer of the islands to Japan.
Paul Richardson's book At the Edge of the Nation is not, however, about Russo-Japanese diplomatic negotiations. Rather, it explores how the Southern Kuril Islands became critically important in the making of Russian national identity after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For Richardson, the debates over whether or not to transfer...
