Kuril Islands

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kuril Islands stretch roughly 1,300 kilometres from the northern tip of Hokkaido all the way to Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, and today they sit at the center of one of the longest-running territorial disputes in the world. Fifty-six islands and countless smaller islets form this volcanic chain, separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the open north Pacific. The population is around 20,000 people, most of them concentrated on the four southernmost islands that Japan calls its Northern Territories. How did a remote, fog-covered arc of volcanoes become the subject of a standoff that has outlasted the Soviet Union itself? The answer reaches back through centuries of Ainu settlement, colonial rivalry, world war, and Cold War calculation. Along the way the islands reveal something stranger: a chain of active peaks whose 2006 eruption sent tsunami waves all the way to the California coast.

• 2. A Name from the Ainu

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  The Ainu people inhabited the Kuril Islands from early times, though few written records survive from before the 17th century. Their autonym for the islands, kur, simply means 'man', and that word became Kuril. The same root may explain the Ainu name for Sakhalin, Kuyi or Kuye, and for Hokkaido, Kai, suggesting a shared cultural geography stretching across the region. Japanese sources know the chain as the Chishima Islands, written with kanji meaning 'thousand islands'. Russians who arrived in the 18th century gave a different explanation entirely: they derived a name from their word kurit', meaning 'to smoke', because the volcanic plumes rising from the islands looked like perpetual columns of smoke. Both etymologies describe the same reality from different vantage points. A Dutch expedition under Maarten Gerritsz Vries reached the islands in 1643, and the Russian Fedot Alekseyevich Popov sailed into the area around 1649, beginning a period of competing European and Japanese claims that would take centuries to resolve.

• 3. Fire, Ice, and Fog

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  Atlasov Island, at the northern end of the chain, is an almost perfect volcanic cone that rises sheer out of the sea, and its summit at Alaid Volcano, standing 2,339 metres high, is the highest point in all of Sakhalin Oblast. Japanese artists depicted it in haiku and woodblock prints much as they rendered Mount Fuji. The Kurils are part of the Ring of Fire, built by the subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the Okhotsk Plate, which also carved the Kuril Trench roughly 200 kilometres east of the islands. The chain holds around 100 volcanoes, about 40 of them active, alongside countless hot springs and fumaroles. The seismic record is vivid: a magnitude 8.5 earthquake struck in 1963, and on the 15th of November 2006 a magnitude 8.3 event generated tsunami waves that reached up to 5 feet high on the California coast. Raikoke Island, near the centre of the chain, erupted again in June 2019, sending emissions to 13,000 metres. The climate matches the geology in severity. Winters are long, cold, and stormy; summers are short and notoriously foggy. Annual precipitation runs between 40 and 50 inches, much of it as snow. Kunashir, at the southern end, has its own Tyatya volcano, which peaks at 1,819 metres.

• 4. A Marine World

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  The confluence of the Okhotsk Sea gyre and the southward Oyashio Current makes the waters around the Kurils among the most productive in the entire North Pacific. Vast kelp beds surrounding nearly every island shelter sea urchins, mollusks, and the creatures that prey on them. Walleye pollock, Pacific cod, and several species of flatfish are the most commercially important species further offshore. During the 1980s, migratory Japanese sardine was one of the most abundant fish in the summer waters. Fur seals were heavily exploited for their pelts in the 19th and early 20th centuries; the largest reproductive rookeries, including those on Raykoke Island, were wiped out during that period. Since the 1960s commercial harvest has essentially stopped, and pinniped populations appear to be recovering. Sea otters suffered comparable pressure from heavy 19th-century pelt hunting. The islands are also home to many millions of seabirds, including northern fulmars, tufted puffins, murres, kittiwakes, guillemots, auklets, petrels, gulls, and cormorants. BirdLife International has recognised several island groups, including Kunashir and the northern chain from Urup to Paramushir, as Important Bird Areas because they support populations of threatened species. The now-extinct Japanese sea lion was once an occasional visitor to the islands.

• 5. War and Soviet Seizure

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  In 1941, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto ordered the Imperial Japanese Navy strike force to assemble in Tankan Bay on Iturup Island before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The location was chosen precisely because of its sparse population, absence of foreigners, and constant fog cover. The Admiral issued the order to move on the morning of the 26th of November. American forces launched their first bombardment of Japanese bases on Shumshu and Paramushir on the 10th of July 1943, when eight B-25 Mitchells from the 77th Bombardment Squadron flew from Alexai airfield under the command of Captain James L. Hudelson. A follow-up mission on the 11th of September 1943 dispatched eight B-24 Liberators and twelve B-25s; 74 crew members in three B-24s and seven B-25s failed to return, with 22 killed in action, one taken prisoner, and 51 interned in Kamchatka. The Americans also ran a strategic deception called Operation Wedlock, which convinced the Japanese to increase their northern Kurils garrison from 8,000 in 1943 to 41,000 in 1944 and to maintain more than 400 aircraft in the region. The decisive shift came from diplomacy, not battle. The February 1945 Yalta Agreement promised the Kuril Islands to the Soviet Union in exchange for entering the Pacific War against Japan. Soviet forces invaded the North and South Kurils between the 18th of August and the 31st of August 1945, and by 1946 the entire Japanese civilian population of roughly 17,000 had been expelled.

• 6. The Unresolved Dispute

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  Japan's claim rests on the four southernmost islands: Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan, and the unpopulated Habomai islets, which Tokyo calls the Northern Territories. The Japanese government also argues that the Kuril Islands beyond those four, along with South Karafuto, remain undetermined under international law because the San Francisco Peace Treaty does not specify their ownership and the Soviet Union never signed it. Russia's position is that its administration derives from the Yalta Agreement and the Soviet invasion of 1945. On the 8th of February 2017, the Russian government gave names to five previously unnamed islands, honouring figures including Andrei Gromyko, the long-serving Soviet foreign minister, and Anna Shchetinina, making the naming itself a quiet assertion of sovereignty. The islands are today divided into three administrative districts, all part of Sakhalin Oblast. About 19,400 people live on the chain; roughly 16,700 of them live on the four disputed southern islands, and approximately 2,600 live on Paramushir in the north. In 2022, Russia established a special economic zone on the islands with a twenty-year exemption from corporate income tax and value-added tax, intended as part of a broader plan to develop the Russian Far East. During that same year, parts of the 18th Machine Gun Artillery Division stationed on Iturup were reported redeployed to eastern Ukraine.

• 7. Life on the Edge

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  Fishing is the primary occupation on the Kurils, and the islands hold strategic value both for their fisheries and for mineral deposits of pyrite, sulfur, and various polymetallic ores. Gidrostroy, the islands' largest business group, with interests in fishing, construction, and real estate, opened its second fish processing factory on Iturup in 2006, introducing a conveyor system. A pier and breakwater were completed in Kitovy Bay on central Iturup in 2014, where barges carry goods between the cove and ships anchored offshore. The local government is upgrading a geothermal power plant at Mount Baransky, an active volcano on Iturup, to handle growing electricity demand. Red and Arctic foxes were introduced to the central islands in the 1880s for the sake of the fur trade, and the bulk of terrestrial mammal biomass today is made up of rodents, many introduced in historical times. One animal associated with the islands has found an unexpected international following: the Kurilian Bobtail, a domestic cat whose short tail results from a dominant gene mutation, is said to originate from the Kuril Islands and has become a popular breed in Russia.