By Anthony Paul
WHILE Europe was still adjusting its borders after World War I, Sydney humorist Lenny Lower observed that "geography is so unsettled lately. You've got to wait for the evening paper's late final extra edition to find out if places are still on the map."
In recent weeks we have been reminded that Hokkaido, out of world headlines for most of the past 23 years, is still with us.
Not since September 1, 1983, when the Soviet Air Force shot down a Korean airliner, killing its 269 passengers and crew, have newspaper readers been obliged to take note of major events on Japan's northernmost large island.
This latest incident on August 16 was tragic enough but far more modest than a downed airliner.
A Russian border patrol boat opened fire on Kisshin Maru No 31, a small Japanese boat allegedly intruding near Russian-controlled Kaigarajima Island off Hokkaido in order to poach crab.
The Russians aimed what they said were warning shots, but one of them fatally hit a fisherman in the head.
In Vladivostok on Monday the trial of the Japanese captain, Noboru Sakashita, began behind closed doors. Russia's sensitivity was on display again on Thursday, when its coastguard fired on and then detained a South Korean fishing trawler with 31 people aboard allegedly poaching in the same general area as the Kisshin Maru.
Japan and Russia have been in dispute about sovereignty over the region since 1945, when the invading Red Army seized four islands that Japan these days calls its Northern Territories. The diplomatic friction flares up periodically. In some limited details, conditions in the region when KAL 007 went down and last month, when Kisshin Maru was hit, were similar.
Months ahead of the KAL 007 incident in 1983 Moscow had ordered a strengthening of border security in the Soviet Far East. Last month the Russian navy scheduled a major exercise in these waters; it opened the day after the Kisshin Maru incident. It's thus likely that the Russian warship that fired on the Japanese boat was once again operating under orders that were stricter than normal. A comparison of the aftermaths of the two incidents is instructive. The KAL incident made headlines for weeks, launched a UN Security Council extravaganza, caused the banning of the Soviet airline, Aeroflot, from US airspace, and spawned innumerable magazine articles and television documentaries and at least 11 books in English. Murder in the Sky, the mawkish anti-communist ballad it inspired, is still downloadable from the web: "Listen my children and you can hear/Bullets bursting around your ears."
There was a total absence of Soviet repentance about KAL 007.
When asked if border protection was worth 269 deaths, then Chief of the Armed Forces General Staff Marshal N. V. Ogarkov answered, "Protection of the sacred, inviolable border of our country, and of our political system, was worth to us many, many millions of lives."
A month after the Kisshin Maru shooting the incident has all but disappeared from news reports. The difference, of course, is the absence in 2006 of Cold War tensions and messianic Soviet communism. But what is not absent, and likely will never be, is the region's geopolitical and military importance. The map helps explain this - and at least some of Russia's sensitivities.
The Japanese-claimed islands stand between the Russian Far East's two main air and naval bases, Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk.
Vladivostok, home of the Russian Pacific Fleet, is bigger. But Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka peninsula is the only large, northern Pacific naval base that stays ice-free almost year-round.
Here, the Pacific Fleet bases its main ballistic-missile force, perhaps the fleet's single most important element. In the words of an InternationalInstitute for Strategic Studies survey, "The [Pacific] fleet's primary operational mission seems to be to protect [this Petropavlovsk- based force] and to ensure its effective deployment in wartime."
In carrying out these objectives, however, the Russian naval commander faces two serious difficulties. First, Petropavlovsk has virtually no overland routes to the rest of Russia. Most supplies must come by sea. Second, compared with, say, the carrier-rich US Seventh and Third Fleets, the Russian fleet lacks sea-borne air cover. The Russian strategists' answer: turn the Sea of Okhotsk into a Russian lake, concentrating naval forces - especially missile- equipped vessels able to strike at potential targets in North America or China - within range of land- based planes.
Hence the transcendent importance of the Soya Strait (also known as La Perouse Strait), the sea passage between Sakhalin and Hokkaido over which KAL 007 flew and into which Kisshin Maru allegedly intruded. Cut the strait and you sever Petropavlovsk-based forces from supplies and the Vladivostok-based units from access to that vital air cover.
In 1983 the region was one of the Cold War's most spy-ridden frontiers. Japanese security was quite open about identifying for me four senior representatives of the KGB, the secret Soviet espionage service, and the GRU, Soviet military intelligence resident in the Sapporo consulate. But the most unusual spies were a community of Japanese fishermen who clustered around the Minami Chushima ("Southern Kurils") cabaret in Nemuro.
In exchange for information on Japanese Self-Defence Force and US military and naval activities and providing Japanese items then scarce in Soviet Russia - everything from pantyhose to pickup trucks and occasionally Japanese bar girls - the Soviet Border Guards, a KGB- incorporated force, gave them informal permission to trawl the best Soviet-controlled fishing grounds. The Japanese called this spy-ship community repo-sen (literally: report boats). Their fraternising with the KGB involved little legal risk. Because Japan, under its ostensibly pacifist constitution has no "military", Japanese legislatures have taken the position that there can be no military secrets. Spy-ship operators could be prosecuted only for breaches of the customs or quarantine laws and other minor regulations.
Will the Soya Strait ever again attract so much attention? The Kisshin Maru incident is a reminder that it certainly will. US Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, the naval Clausewitz, wrote in his 1911 masterwork, Naval Strategy, that "all military organisations, land or sea, are ultimately dependent upon open communications with the basis of national power".
As long as there's a Russia in Asia, Russians will be dangerously protective about what happens on this star-crossed stretch of sea.
Anthony Paul is a former Editor-at- Large/Asia-Pacific for Fortune magazine of New York, now based in Brisbane.
