I received the news of Professor Hiroshi Kimura’s death, while attending a conference on Russia and Asia at Yale University. As I presented my paper on Russia’s policy toward Japan during the Cold War and after, I was thinking of Kimura, the world’s foremost authority on the Northern Territories dispute between Russia and Japan, and wishing that we had one last chance to debate.

Kimura-san was my colleague and friend at the Slavic Research Center (now Slavic-Eurasian Research Center) of Hokkaido University, when I was at the Center from 1983 to 1991. Remembering many lively conversations I had with him at the Slavic Research Center and elsewhere at numerous conferences we attended, I realize that there were so many topics we never had chance to discuss in depth and I now regret that this chance is lost for ever.

Hiroshi Kimura, Professor Emeritus of Hokkaido University and the International Center for Japanese Studies, died on November 14, 2019, in Nishinomiya, Japan, at the age of 83.

Kimura was born in Seoul in 1936 as the son of a law professor. His family evacuated to Japan, as Russian troops invaded the Korean peninsula at the end of World War II in 1945. From then on, Japan’s relations with Russia became Kimura’s life-long interest, or one might say, obsession, although he never explained to me the relationship between his harrowing childhood experience in the evacuation with his scholarly interest in the Soviet Union/Russia. After he graduated from Kyoto University, he continued graduate work at Kyoto University under Professor Masamichi Inoki, earning a MA. He then went on to do his graduate work at Columbia University, and earned his PhD in political science.

He defended his doctoral dissertation, “Personal Property in the Soviet Union, with Particular Emphasis on the Khrushchev Era: An Ideological, Political, and Economic Dilemma,” in 1968 under the guidance of John Hazard and Peter Juviler of Barnard College. The readers of the dissertation were Alexander Erlich, Charles Syladits of Columbia University and Darrel Hammer of Indiana University. His dissertation was published in Suravu Kenkyu, vol. 13, 1969, pp. 37-85; vol. 14, 1970, pp. 63-119.

I must confess that we never discussed his experience in the US. Columbia University, which was, and still is, one of the best centers of Soviet/Russian studies in the United States, and I would have liked to hear from him about the training he received from John Hazard and Alexander Erlich, the intellectual atmosphere at Columbia he must have observed and breathed, and how his American experience influenced his scholarship and approach to the Soviet Union. His time must have coincided with the time Zbigniew Brzezinski and Seweryn Bialer taught there, and Leopold Haimson in Russian history began to train new social historians.

His dissertation topic was one of the crucial issues that the subsequent Soviet leaders, Brezhnev and Gorbachev, had to tackle, and eventually one of the key economic and social problems that doomed the Soviet Union. After the publication of part of his dissertation, however, Kimura seems to have abandoned pursuing this issue, switching his major focus to Soviet-Japanese relations, especially on the Northern Territories dispute between the Soviet Union/Russia and Japan.

Perhaps, this switch may have had something to do with his career trajectory. Upon obtaining his PhD, he returned to Japan. After teaching at Kobe Gakuin University for two years as lecturer, he was appointed as assistant professor at the Slavic Research Center of Hokkaido University. He took a leave of absence from the university, and worked as an analysist at the Japanese Embassy in Moscow from 1972 to 1974. He served as its director twice from 1975 to 1977, and from 1985 to 1987. While he was at the Slavic Research Center, he continued to have close relations with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Many scholars called him “Mr. Northern Territories.” As an important member of the Ichiro Suetsugu group, which yielded great influence on Japan’s position on the Northern Territories dispute in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as on Japan’s public opinion on this issue, Kimura unbendingly stood for the return of the four islands--Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan, and the Habomai Group--that the Soviet Union seized at the end of World War II, as the precondition of Japan’s agreement for a peace treaty with the Soviet Union/Russia. He never allowed for any compromise on this principled position, regardless of the vicissitudes of the Soviet Union and Russia under Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin and regardless of drastic changes in international relations since Gorbachev’s perestroika. He firmly believed that “law and justice” resided on Japan’s side. In fact, the Northern Territories question was the yardstick Kimura used to measure larger Soviet/Russian-Japanese relations in the international context. When Putin and Prime Minister Mori signed the Irkutsk Declaration in 2001, where Putin accepted the 1956 Joint Declaration, by which the Soviet Union had pledged the return of two smaller islands, while postponing the decision on Etorofu and Kunashiro for further negotiations, Kimura spearheaded the attack on this compromise, which led the Japanese government to renege on the Irkutsk declaration.

When China emerged as a great power and drastically changed the landscape of international relations in East Asia, Russia and Japan began to reassess their relations since 2012. When the issue of the territorial dispute became a major stumbling block for rapprochement between Russia and Japan to readjust their relationship in the new reality of international politics, Kimura issued a stern warning against Japan compromising its principled position on the return of the four islands.

He vigorously championed his cause in his numerous publications in books, articles, and opinion pages as well as frequent TV appearances. He was a regular contributor to “Seiron” in Sankei Shimbun, a conservative newspaper. The compendium of his writings can be gleaned from his two English-language publications, Distant Neighbors, 2 vols (M. E. Sharpe 2000) and The Kurillian Knots: A History of Japanese-Russian Border Negotiations (Stanford University Press, 2008).

Beyond the Northern Territories dispute, he widely wrote about Soviet and Russian political leaders and politics and Soviet-Russian negotiating tactics, including one book on Brezhnev, and three books on Putin. The last book he wrote was on Russian negotiating tactics, history, comparison, and prospects in 2019.

His interpretation on the Northern Territories dispute, and for that matter, on Russia in general, seems to be rooted in his nationalistic sentiment to right the wrong done by the Soviets against Japan at the end of World War II by violating the Neutrality Pact exactly when Japan was seeking Soviet mediation to terminate the war, by capturing 640,000 Japanese in Manchuria and Korea (where Kimura was born), and by seizing the Northern Territories. Kimura represents the conservative wing of Japanese public opinion that views the return of the Northern Territories as the test of national honor.

Kimura and I have different views about Japan’s responsibility for colonialism, imperialism, and the war, but I regret that we never had the chance to discuss freely these crucial issues in depth.

He was above all a public scholar. His major energy and interest were mainly focused on publications. More than anything else, he was interested in injecting his views into Japan’s foreign policy and mobilizing public opinion for the goals he had aimed to achieve all his life. He was an accomplished writer with a keen journalistic sense. He avoided a stilted scholarly style, and wrote to reach the general public. He continued to work right up until the morning when he suffered an aneurysm while taking a morning walk with his wife. He never regained consciousness.

He was awarded in 2016 the Order of Sacred Treasure from the government and the 32nd Seiron Award from Sankei Shinbun.

Throughout his career, he was active in promoting international collaboration of Soviet studies in Japan and abroad. During his first term of the director of the Slavic Research Center from 1975 to 1977, he initiated its foreign visiting fellowship program--an ongoing program, whereby the Slavic Research Center has served as an important bridge connecting Soviet/Russian studies in Japan with those in the United States, Britain, and eventually with Soviet/Russian scholars, as well as scholars in China and South Korea. He generously invited me, despite our differing views on various issues, to many international conferences. I fondly remember animated discussions we engaged in at the multi-year conferences, organized by McGeorge Bundy, where Nobuo Shimotomai, Tsuneaki Sato, Seizaburo Sato, Kimura Hiroshi, and myself engaged in spirited discussions with Gregory Grossman, David Holloway, Ed Hewitt, George Breslauer, Robert Legvold, and other prominent scholars. I am thankful to Kimura for his generosity to include me in these high-powered conferences.