570 on Peace Boat set sail to visit 'Muneo House' on Kunashiri

Japan Policy & Politics, August 19, 2002

KOBE, Aug. 15 Kyodo

Peace Boat, a nongovernmental organization (NGO), left Kobe port on Thursday, taking some 570 passengers on a voyage to places including Kunashiri Island, despite a Foreign Ministry request not to visit the disputed territory.

With permission from the Sakhalin provincial government, tour participants will make a special visa-free trip on a cruise liner to Kunashiri Island off Hokkaido, controlled by Russia but claimed by Japan, after visiting North Korea, South Korea and Sakhalin, Peace Boat officials said.

In addition to visiting such facilities on Kunashiri Island as a diesel power plant, the participants will also stay at a facility dubbed ''Muneo House,'' which is connected with a scandal involving Japanese lawmaker Muneo Suzuki, who is now arrested and detained on suspicion of bribery.

The NGO had sponsored a goodwill cruise to Kunashiri and Shikotan islands under a similar visa-free arrangement in 1991 with 116 passengers. The voyage this time will carry the largest number of Japanese people to the disputed island since the end of the World War II.

According to Peace Boat officials, the tour is intended to enhance mutual understanding at the grassroots level to work out measures to settle the decades-old territorial row.

The Japanese Foreign Ministry, however, opposes the trip and had sent a letter in April from Russian Division Director Toyohisa Kozuki to the group, urging it to call off the trip as it goes against the government's stance that Russia is illegally occupying Kunashiri, Shikotan and Etorofu islands and the Habomai group of islets off Hokkaido.

The disputed isles were seized by Soviet troops at the end of World War II. The long-standing territorial dispute has prevented Japan and Russia from concluding a postwar peace treaty.

In a cabinet decision in 1989, the government decided to urge Japanese nationals not to seek visas from the then Soviet authorities to visit the islands as it believed such action could be taken as an endorsement of Moscow's ownership of the territories.

As an exception, Japan and Russia agreed to launch in 1992 a visa-free exchange program aimed at promoting ties between Japanese -- mainly former residents of the islands -- and the Russian inhabitants of the islands.

''If we leave matters to such a Foreign Ministry that tells citizens 'don't go, don't see, don't ask and don't listen,' it is clear that negotiations for the return of the islands will never proceed,'' said Tatsuya Yoshioka, a representative of Peace Boat.

To promote ''NGO diplomacy,'' the tour will also visit Wonsan and other places in North Korea to meet with Korean survivors of the 1945 U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ''comfort women'' who were forced to serve as sexual slaves for the Imperial Japanese Army during the war.

The group will later stop by Pusan in South Korea and travel to Korsakov in southern Sakhalin to meet with Koreans who were left behind there after the war. Korsakov was formerly colonized by Japan.

The organizers said about 10 Korean permanent residents of Japan are participating in the tour, and they have received special entry permits from the North and South Korean governments.

The Tokyo-based Peace Boat, established in 1983, has sponsored 36 global cruises on chartered passenger ships to promote peace, human rights and environmental issues.