Rising Sun in the Warming Arctic: As Great Power Competition Returns to the Polar Region, Japan Is Positioned for Prominence

Back to Publications

A map of the Arctic illustrating the location and proximity, and therefore the importance, of both Aleutian Islands and Kuril Islands to Arctic maritime discussions. Photo: Japan Consortium for Arctic Environmental Research

The Arctic Institute Japan Series 2026

---

Japan was, for much of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, a North Pacific great power in command of Northeast Asia’s near-Arctic seas and insular territories, and was even, albeit briefly, a global Arctic power with its possession of the outer Aleutian Islands. Invaded and held for a year during World War II, Tokyo’s occupation of the outer Aleutian Islands had effectively put Japan in a position to block the projection of American air and sea power from North America across the High North Pacific, thus preventing a direct assault on Japan’s main islands from the north.

In the post-WWII years, Japan’s formerly-held Kuril Islands have remained, with controversy and continued protest by Tokyo, under Russian occupation within sight of Hokkaido’s shores. As Russia resurges as a military power, refortify and modernise its Kuril possessions, and increasingly aligns with China in a mutual diplomatic, geostrategic and economic embrace, Japan is poised to re-emerge as a front-line state in the West’s diplomatic and military regional posture. This is due to its favorably situated forward geography for the projection of air and sea power into the North Pacific and beyond to the Pacific Arctic region, with its proximate access to the eastern terminus of the Northern Sea Route.

With the narrow Soya Strait increasingly transited by Russian and Chinese war ships, Tokyo’s century-and-a-half possession of Hokkaido and its subsequent northward expansion to Sakhalin, the Kurils, and (briefly) the Aleutians alongside its active contemporary polar research community and its numerous elements of an inherent Arcticness position this North Pacific archipelagic nation to, once again, become an important regional military power and a key western ally in an increasingly active and more muscularly contested Arctic region. Indeed, the unresolved border dispute between Japan and Russia over the southern Kurils that has been simmering since the end of World War II presents a contemporary fault line that could potentially erupt into war should the region destabilize under new pressures of China’s expanding Arctic ambitions.

Japan has itself experienced its own long, dynamic sovereign journey as a northern, and briefly Arctic, power, and at the height of its empire in World War II was the predominant military power in the High North Pacific and Bering Sea. During its year-long possession of the outer Aleutian Islands, Japan was a bona fide polar power – capping a century of expanding into territories hitherto held by Russia, and before 1991 the Soviet Union, in what is widely described as “the Russian Far East,” but which increasingly became Japanese-held territory from the middle of the 19^th century through to nearly the middle of the 20^th. Japan’s experiences during this stretch of historic northward territorial and maritime expansion inform, to a considerable extent, its understanding of the current great power competition (GPC) dynamics in the region. Also relevant in this context is Japan’s identity, and experiences, as a whaling nation whose enduring whale harvesting economy and culture provides it with further touch points for mutual understanding with Arctic nations and peoples.

Additionally, Japan’s northernmost major island, Hokkaido, is the traditional homeland of the Ainu indigenous people, who have in recent years made noted gains in restoring their indigenous rights, mirroring those of their counterparts in the Arctic states. This development alone provides Japan with an additional layer of understanding and engagement with the indigenous peoples of the Arctic as well as the Arctic states on a wide spectrum of issues ranging from minority rights to sustainable economic development, (re)distribution of wealth, and national sovereignty. These perspectives help to inform and contextualize Japan’s past, present and future as a northern state with growing Arctic interests, and, in many ways, an inherent Arcticness that positions it well for the coming years of an increasingly contested Arctic.

Echoes of an Earlier Age of Northward State Expansion and Collision

World War II in the Pacific ended just over 80 years ago with Japan’s historic August 15, 1945 acceptance of surrender, bringing to a close Japan’s stunning rise to, and fall from, its globe-spanning heights of great power expansion in the prior decades after its navy defeated Russia in 1905, paving the way for its expansion first to Manchuria and Korea, and then as far north as Sakhalin island and the Kuril island chain before turning its military attention to the subjugation of Southeast Asia and Oceania.¹⁾For an overview of the final years of the Japanese empire, see: Toland J (1970) The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945. New York: Random House. Japan’s defeat, amongst other things, brought an end to Tokyo’s bid to become a polar power which took form with its invasion and occupation of the outer Aleutian Islands, threatening United States marine access and power projection in the North Pacific and the Bering Sea.²⁾On the war in the Aleutians, see: Garfield B (1982) The Thousand-Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians. New York: Bantam Books Perras G.R. (2003). Stepping Stones to Nowhere: The Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and American Military Strategy, 1867-1945. Vancouver: UBC Press; and Cloe J.H. (2017) Attu: The Forgotten Battle, Anchorage: United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/aleu/planyourvisit/upload/Attu-Forgotten-Battle-Optimized-508.pdf. Accessed on 1 January 2026. With Japan’s eventual expulsion from the Aleutians, the four southern-most Kuril Islands (Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan, and the Habomai) were soon invaded and occupied by Soviet Russia which also seized Japan’s territorial possessions on south Sakhalin Island by force.³⁾It is important to point out that this territory had come under Japanese control first from 1855-75 and again after its victory in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war.

Japan’s remote Alaska garrisons in the outer Aleutian Islands had been fully reconquered two years before its World War II surrender by a joint US-Canadian liberation force assembled methodically in the Pacific waters off North America’s west coast; the first of long and bloody island-hopping campaign that severed Japan’s tenuously overstretched naval sea lines of communications. The collapse of Japan’s northern foothold in Alaska and its subsequent collapse in Sakhalin and the Kurils marked the end of the Pacific War, thereby reversing Japan’s imperial expansion in the preceding years. The US-Canadian campaign to liberate the outer Aleutians was described aptly by Ira F. Wintermute in 1943 as a “war in the fog,” as much for the impact of the North’s infamous weather as for the campaign’s many frictional consequence of the fog of war.⁴⁾Zellen B (2021) War in the Fog: Historical Memory, the Fog of War, and Unforgetting the Aleutians War. Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 22, No. 2: 193–199; Wintermute I (1943) War in the Fog. American Magazine, August, p2. From the restoration of U.S. sovereignty over the island of Kiska in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands chain on August 15, 1943 to the Emperor’s dramatic surrender announcement two years later to the very day in Tokyo Bay, a determined, bloody and successful island-hopping campaign would transpire from the frigid subarctic waters of the Aleutians to the tropical waters of the South Pacific.

The historic importance of the war in the Aleutians cannot be overstated and its geopolitical linkage to the broader Pacific War offers insights for the contemporary world and the reemergence of GPC in the Arctic and unfolding remilitarization of the region where the prospect of a conflict is now considered possible if not yet probable. With growing global geostrategic interest in the Arctic and subarctic regions, the lessons of the Alaskan and High North Pacific battles of WWII are particularly salient once more, and can be used to contextualize and re-frame Japan’s historic role as a geopolitical contender that successfully disrupted and diminished the capacity of both the United States and Soviet Russia to project power into the Arctic and North Pacific – a role China could now seek to emulate.⁵⁾Lamazhapov E and Østhagen A (2025) Alaska, Not Greenland, Should Worry the United States in the Arctic,” The Arctic Institute, October 28, https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/alaska-greenland-should-worry-the-united-states-arctic/. Accessed on 1 January 2026.

However, a militarily resurgent and aggressively nationalistic Japan could – albeit not imminently likely – also potentially reprise this historic role should this Northeast Asian and North Pacific gateway to the Arctic via the Northern Sea Route (NSR) ever enter into a period of intensifying geopolitical instability.⁶⁾Barrash I (2022) Russia’s Militarization of the Kuril Islands. Center for Strategic & International Studies Blog, 27 September, https://www.csis.org/blogs/new-perspectives-asia/russias-militarization-kuril-islands, cited in Choudhury S (2024) A Dispute for the Decades: The Russo-Japanese Struggle for the Kuril Islands. Harvard International Review, 5 December, https://hir.harvard.edu/kuril-islands-russia-japan/. Accessed on 1 January 2026. This is particularly the case with regard to the status of Kuril Islands and the prospect of renewed conflict between Japan and Russia over them and the importance of Hokkaido as a staging ground. And while analysts such as Samara Choudhury discounts the likelihood of a renewal of armed confrontation between Tokyo and Moscow over the disputed southern Kuril Islands’ sovereignty, he nonetheless cautions it remains “unlikely that the conflict will be resolved in the near future. The ambiguity surrounding control over the islands only allows for tensions to rise.”⁷⁾Choudhury S (2024) A Dispute for the Decades: The Russo-Japanese Struggle for the Kuril Islands. Harvard International Review, 5 December, https://hir.harvard.edu/kuril-islands-russia-japan/. Accessed on 1 January 2026. Also at play is the Kuril Island own curious and potentially significant interconnections with the Ukraine War.⁸⁾Choudhury S (2024) A Dispute for the Decades: The Russo-Japanese Struggle for the Kuril Islands. Harvard International Review, 5 December, https://hir.harvard.edu/kuril-islands-russia-japan/. Accessed on 1 January 2026.

While Japan remains a loyal Pacific ally of the United States and a vast and vital offshore platform for the projection of military power throughout Northeast Asia, moreover, Washington has remained largely disengaged from Japan’s Kuril Island dispute with Russia. Hokkaido remains far less integrated with American military power as compared to Okinawa in Japan’s south. However, as the Arctic becomes increasingly re-militarized, Hokkaido is where Japan continues to face off against Russia over these disputed islands – and where the restoration of Japanese sovereignty over the four southernmost Kurils remains a simmering sovereignty dispute that could, in time, become a future flashpoint of conflict.

As Alec Rice describes at West Point’s Modern War Institute blog, Hokkaido is “bordered by the Sea of Japan to the west, the Sea of Okhotsk to the northeast, and the Pacific Ocean to the southeast. Toward its south it is separated from the Japanese island of Honshu by the Tsugaru Strait, while the Russian island of Sakhalin is only forty-three kilometers away across the Soya Strait to the north. Both the Soya and Tsugaru Straits are vital for Russian and Chinese military and commercial shipping access through the Sea of Japan to the Pacific.”⁹⁾Rice A (2023) North to Hokkaido: The Case for a Permanent US Army Presence on Japan’s Northern Frontier. Modern War Institute Blog, 31 May, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/north-to-hokkaido-the-case-for-a-permanent-us-army-presence-on-japans-northern-frontier/. Accessed on 1 January 2026. In the event tensions rise, waters adjacent to Hokkaido waters – and in particular the 26-mile Soya (also known as La Pérouse) Strait between Hokkaido and Sakhalin – could emerge as a vulnerable chokepoint that could jeopardize NSR shipping between Northeast Asia and Europe. Indeed, in the event Hokkaido becomes contested militarily, the entire region could become embroiled in a naval clash of a scale unseen since World War II; a scenario which could be as consequential as the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 which planted the seed for Japan’s imperial expansion and the global war that followed.

Hokkaido as a Cultural, Economic and Geopolitical Crossroads

The long-contested yet strategically pivotal geography of Hokkaido and the Kuril Islands anchors Japan’s relevance to Arctic stability requiring Tokyo to reconsider its predominantly southward strategic gaze, shaped by concerns over Taiwan and China’s recurring maritime incursions around Japan’s contested southern territories,¹⁰⁾Ryall J (2022) As regional tensions rise, China probing neighbors’ defense, Deutsche Welle, 13 October, https://www.dw.com/en/china-probes-its-neighbors-defenses-as-regional-tensions-rise/a-63423101. Accessed on 1 January 2026; Lendon B and Ogura J (2024) Japan claims Chinese military plane violated its territorial airspace for the first time, CNN, 27 August 27, https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/27/asia/japan-china-military-plane-airspace-violation-intl-hnk-ml. Accessed on 1 January 2026; Kyodo News (2024) Chinese aircraft carrier enters southern Japan contiguous zone, Kyodo News, 18 September, https://english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/49942. Accessed on 1 January 2026. and instead strive for a balanced approach. Tokyo needs to pivot to the north, where Beijing, in conjunction with Moscow, are probing Japan’s frontiers with increasing frequency and intensity. Indeed, according to Alec Rice, “Japan is an ideal archipelagic staging area in the western Pacific” and its “geographic location as the backbone of the first and second island chains indeed makes it a critical strategic location,” particularly Hokkaido.¹¹⁾Rice A (2023) North to Hokkaido: The Case for a Permanent US Army Presence on Japan’s Northern Frontier. Modern War Institute Blog, 31 May, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/north-to-hokkaido-the-case-for-a-permanent-us-army-presence-on-japans-northern-frontier/. Accessed on 1 January 2026.

As Rice observes, since “the early nineteenth century, the increasing encroachment of the West and Russia sounded an alarm within then-shuttered Japan of the necessity to secure its northern border. With the fall of the shogunate in the 1860s and the advent of the Meiji Restoration, organized settlement of Hokkaido and beyond began in earnest in conjunction with Japan’s rapid industrial modernization.” Adds Rice: “A core endeavor of the settlement of Hokkaido was the tondenhei, or ‘colonial troops,’ system … a homesteading/military program in which former families of the now-disbanded samurai class … not only helped settle Japan’s undeveloped northern frontier, but also served as a military bulwark against Russian encroachment from the north.”¹²⁾Rice A (2023) North to Hokkaido: The Case for a Permanent US Army Presence on Japan’s Northern Frontier. Modern War Institute Blog, 31 May, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/north-to-hokkaido-the-case-for-a-permanent-us-army-presence-on-japans-northern-frontier/. Accessed on 1 January 2026.

Hokkaido continued to serve as an important bulwark against southward encroachment by Soviet Russia after World War II, through the Cold War, and into the post-Cold War era. Moreover, while it is distant from Taiwan and thus widely perceived to be peripheral to recent efforts to contain China’s rise, for today’s emergent Arctic cold war with its intensifying strategic alignment between Beijing and Moscow, Hokkaido proffers a “geographic location that is strategically consequential when considering the current global atmosphere of renewed great power competition … Since forcibly taking the Japanese territories of southern Sakhalin (known in Japanese as Minami Karafuto) and the Kuril Islands at the close of World War II, the Soviet Union – and, since its collapse, Russia – has maintained military forces there as a protective gateway for Pacific access from its Far East port of Vladivostok.”¹³⁾Rice A (2023) North to Hokkaido: The Case for a Permanent US Army Presence on Japan’s Northern Frontier. Modern War Institute Blog, 31 May, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/north-to-hokkaido-the-case-for-a-permanent-us-army-presence-on-japans-northern-frontier/. Accessed on 1 January 2026.

This contested but well positioned forward geography that Japan holds with its continuing possession of Hokkaido and its former possession of the Kurils, Sakhalin and (briefly) the outer Aleutians informs Japan’s perspective on Arctic security in a warming and increasingly contested world. As Khan Pham describes, in “an age of climate crisis and growing great power competition, Japan faces increasing incentives to engage itself across the Arctic region’s research, governance, and emerging commerce landscape” and “asserts itself as an essential partner in stewarding and studying this vital region alongside fellow concerned nations. Both international collaboration and domestic coordination are key vehicles for Japan to match its ambitions with its capabilities in an increasingly busy Polar North.”¹⁴⁾Pham K (2024) Japan Steps Up Its Arctic Engagement. The Arctic Institute. 16 April, https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/japan-steps-up-arctic-engagement/. Accessed on 1 January 2026. As the Arctic remilitarizes and old Cold War fault lines between East and West re-remerge as salient boundaries defining new blocs of increasing mutually exclusive cooperation, in other words, Japan, similar to other states, too has begun to rethink the foundations of its Arctic security.

As a neighbor of China with a mutual interest in increasing Arctic engagement, a neighbor of Russia with an unresolved sovereignty dispute over Russia’s continued occupation of the southern Kurils since they fell to Moscow during the final days of World War II, and the most-northerly Asian ally of the West, Japan has had to walk a delicate walk. Especially since Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, with the consequent tightening of the strategic alignment between Beijing and Moscow, Japan, along with its neighbors and fellow stakeholders at the Arctic Council, has been forced by necessity to acknowledge that the Arctic has become increasingly divided as GPC displaces circumpolar cooperation as the predominant paradigm in Arctic diplomacy.

Ever since Japan’s northward expansion absorbed Hokkaido in the latter half of the 19^th century, its sovereign possession has imbued Japan with what can be described as an inherent Arcticness, from its important cultural role as the homeland of the indigenous Ainu people to its historic role as an essential frontier buffer to contain Russian expansion, to its emergent role as an exemplar of Japan’s recent efforts to confront its complex history of expansion onto indigenously self-governing lands and its willingness to increasingly recognize Ainu indigenous rights; a process that catalyzed by land losses and large scale megaprojects such as the contentious Nibutani dam project that expropriated and then flooded Ainu lands along the Saru River.¹⁵⁾Stevens G (2010) More Than Paper: Protecting Ainu Culture and Influencing Japanese Dam Development. Cultural Survival Quarterly, 7 May, https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/more-paper-protecting-ainu-culture-and-influencing. Accessed on 1 January 2026.

While this has been a slow and incremental process facing persistent bureaucratic resistance from Japan’s national government, the years since have witnessed further progress on the restoration of Ainu rights starting in 1997 with the Act for the Promotion of Ainu Culture followed in 2008 by the non-binding but no less historically important resolution recognizing the Ainu as an indigenous people of Japan. Subsequently, these paved the way to the more formal and binding 2019 Ainu Culture Promotion Law.¹⁶⁾Gayman J (2021) State Policy, Indigenous Activism, and the Conundrums of Ethnicity for the Ainu of Japan, Chapter 20 of Routledge Handbook of Race and Ethnicity in Asia, Michael Weiner ed. London: Routledge, pp286-302.

In addition to its shared commitment to redressing historical injustices against its own Indigenous peoples through its proactive policies of indigenous rights recognition and re-affirmation, Japan also shares with the Arctic a long and proud history as a whaling nation joining fellow commercial whaling nations, Iceland and Norway and subsistence whaling nations including Canada, the United States, Greenland, Denmark, and Russia. Japan recently brought to an end its controversial scientific program in Antarctic waters, shifting its whaling practices to coastal whaling within its EEZ, so that its cultural commitment to continued whaling now has much more in common with the Arctic states, and faces less political pushback than its more controversial Antarctic whaling program, which had been targeted by the international animal rights movements popular in many western nations.¹⁷⁾Zellen B (2023) Lessons from the 1982 Canadian IWC Withdrawal and Restoration of Inuit Bowhead Hunting for Japan’s 2019 IWC Withdrawal and Restoration of Coastal Whaling. Chapter 8 in Part II: Cultural Considerations, Nikolas Sellheim and Joji Morishita, eds., Japan’s Withdrawal from International Whaling Regulation: Implications for Global Environmental Diplomacy. London: Routledge.

Though hampered by both domestic and international headwinds, and with historic tensions arising from the decimation of whale stocks by commercial whalers adversely impacting indigenous subsistence whalers, whaling as a national and indigenous tradition has served as a cultural, economic and diplomatic bridge uniting Japan with Iceland and Norway through their bilateral whale trade while also providing a starting point for Japan to engage with the Arctic states with active indigenous whaling practices including the United States, Canada, Greenland/Denmark and Russia. More broadly, such endeavors further reinforce the notion that Japan’s proud and enduring whaling heritage is part and parcel of its inherent Arcticness.

It’s not just lessons and traditions from the past that informs Japan’s perception of Hokkaido as a strategic frontier but visions for the future as well, and in particular, the digital future. Tokyo has thus been pursuing an ambitious strategy to leverage its fortuitously forward geography adjacent to the polar world to turn Hokkaido into a future digital hub that interconnects global fiber-optic data networks as reflected in initiatives such as Japan’s subsea East Asia to America (E2A) Cable System and Far North Fiber (FNF) projects.¹⁸⁾Submarine Cable Networks (n.d.) E2A. SubmarineNetworks.com, https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/trans-pacific/e2a. Accessed on 1 January 2026; and Far North Fiber (n.d.). FarNorthFiber.com, https://www.farnorthfiber.com/. Accessed on 1 January 2026 Additionally, Tokyo has designated Hokkaido as a key region for its Green Transformation and Digital Garden City Nation initiatives, subsidizing not only subsea cable projects but data centers as well.¹⁹⁾GR Japan (2023) Overview of Japan’s Green Transformation (GX). GRJapan.com, https://grjapan.com/sites/default/files/content/articles/files/gr_japan_overview_of_gx_plans_january_2023.pdf. Accessed on 1 January 2026; The Government of Japan – Japan Gov (n.d.) Digital Garden City Nation. Japan.go.jp, https://www.japan.go.jp/topics/Digital_Garden_City_Nation.html. Accessed on 1 January 2026 Its cooler climate, project advocates believe, makes Hokkaido an optimal, energy-efficient location for data centers, and Hokkaido’s relative remoteness and seismic stability offers protection from future natural disasters, enhancing Japan’s resiliency while at the same time promising reduce latency in data transmission between the continents.

Conclusion

Hokkaido’s geographical remoteness proffers strategic centrality in a world where the Arctic is emerging as a geostrategic center. As the vision of the Hokkaido Data Center Campus Network describes: “Hokkaido has a vast amount of land. The construction of large-scale renewable energy power stations by both domestic and international companies will establish an environment in which renewable energy is readily available, giving Hokkaido the potential to attract many data centers going forward.”²⁰⁾Hokkaido Data Center Campus Network, undated, https://hokkaidodatacenter.jp/en/vision-en/. Accessed on 1 January 2026. Large-scale projects exemplified by the Nibutani Dam case, which flooded Ainu lands yet ultimately catalyzed the restoration of Ainu rights and their recognition as Japan’s indigenous people, offer Japan a constructive narrative for development in Hokkaido and, by extension, the Arctic, mirroring the Western Arctic nation’s shift from imposed state megaprojects to co-managed ventures incorporating Indigenous equity and governance.

Japan’s vision for Hokkaido as a green-energy hub powering AI-oriented data centers could ultimately deepen this alignment, particularly if Tokyo extends Ainu restoration beyond cultural recognition and towards land rights and shared prosperity thereby positioning Hokkaido as a model of sustainable, collaborative northern development, and, critically, as a distinct Arctic strategic advantage in Japan’s intensifying competition with China and Russia.

Barry Scott Zellen is a Research Scholar in the Department of Geography at the University of Connecticut (UConn).