For Russia, they are the justly earned spoils of war. For Japan, the southern Kurile Islands are stolen territory, lost to Soviet aggression and Western interference. More than 70 years after the last shot was fired in World War II, the two countries remain locked in a stalemate over four wave-battered islands.
The Kurile Islands: Why World War II Never Ended
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The remains of a Soviet soldier killed during the operation to seize the Kurile Islands in 1945. Japan claims the four islands closest to the Japanese mainland are not part of the Kurile chain and the U.S.S.R. therefore had no right to capture them.
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A Japanese gravestone on Kunashir Island. Once captured in 1945, there was a period of uneasy cohabitation (which is the subject of a 2014 animated film) before Josef Stalin ordered the forceful eviction of the Japanese population to mainland Japan in 1947.
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Winter on Iturup Island. Today, around 19,000 Russians populate the disputed islands.
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Dusk in the harbor on Kunashir Island. Fishing is the main source of income for the Russians here, but infrastructure is ragged and economic prospects for locals are generally bleak. A Japanese man who was evicted in 1947 described his former homeland as "a wasteland" when he visited in 2005.