Officials in Tokyo and Moscow have agreed to run the same plot beats again, with a diplomatic protest lodged, filed and laminated in advance of the visit it protests.
A presidential visit to the disputed Kuril Islands has triggered a Japanese protest that was reportedly drafted, notarised and laminated eleven days in advance, in line with standing ministry procedure. Moscow's rejection was printed in the same 2019 batch. Analysts describe the eighty-year dispute as less a diplomatic process than a screensaver.
The Kuril Islands, a windswept chain of volcanic rock that has spent eight decades being claimed by two governments who both know exactly how this ends, has been renewed for another season, following a presidential visit that drew the expected protest from Tokyo and the expected shrug from everywhere else.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's appearance on one of the disputed islands prompted Japan to lodge a formal objection, as Japan has done on every previous occasion, in what officials describe as a legacy format. Reuters, the Associated Press and Al Jazeera all reported the visit, each apparently unaware that the others were reporting the identical thing, which is itself part of the tradition.
What is new this time is administrative. Japan's Ministry of Repetition, established at some point in the 1970s and never once audited, confirmed that its protest concerning the visit was drafted, approved, notarised and laminated eleven days before the visit occurred, in accordance with standing procedure.
"We no longer write them individually," said ministry undersecretary Kenji Marumoto, gesturing at a filing cabinet described by visitors as load-bearing. "There is a master document. One inserts the date, the island and the mode of transport by which the President arrived. There is a tick-box for helicopter. There is a tick-box for boat. Last year somebody added a tick-box for 'unclear'."
Moscow's response was similarly pre-cooked. A spokesperson for the regional administration, Valentina Ozerova, confirmed that the Russian counter-statement rejecting the Japanese protest had been printed in the same batch, at the same printer, in 2019.
"We share a supplier," Ozerova said. "It is the only functioning element of the bilateral relationship and we are both extremely reluctant to disturb it."
A dispute with no third act
Diplomatic observers have grown weary of the property. The islands were taken at the end of the Second World War, Japan has never accepted the outcome, Russia has never contemplated the alternative, and a peace treaty formally ending the conflict has therefore remained unsigned since 1945 — a stalemate so stable that regional insurers now classify it as scenery rather than risk.
"Every so often somebody in a suit announces a fresh initiative," said Dr Helena Braithwaite of the Institute for Unresolved Cartography, an outfit she describes as permanently funded because the field is permanently unresolved. "There are working groups. There is a communique. Then a leader stands on a beach in a coat, everyone shouts, and we return to base position. It is not diplomacy. It is a screensaver."
Braithwaite noted that the fishing rights, the visa-free graveyard visits and the periodic promises of joint economic development have all been attempted, abandoned, and attempted again by successors who did not read the file.
One is reminded, inevitably, of every other line drawn on a map by exhausted men in 1945 and defended ever since by men who were not there. The islands, for their part, remain cold, remain volcanic, and remain entirely indifferent to which flag is photographed on them.
