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Alright, I’m gonna level with you guys: I need a vacation.
This 9 to 5 job is just killing me.
Every single day, it’s the same routine: I wake up, put on my YouTube suit, drive down
to the YouTube office, and sit in my YouTube cubicle for another eight agonizing hours,
right next to that awful Wendover Productions guy.
He spends all day talking about “Boeing this” and “Brilliant that”...
I mean, c’mon, does that guy ever shut up?
Fortunately, I found some cheap tickets to a nice, secluded vacation spot: Shikotan Island,
right off the coast of Japan.
Now, it might seem like there’s not a lot to do in Shikotan, since there are only two
nearly-abandoned villages here, one of which was destroyed in an earthquake and the other
of which has a name that loosely translates to “crab factory,” but don’t worry—I
have a very tight itinerary.
As soon as I wake up, I’m going to have a big, leisurely breakfast at the only restaurant
on the island, which it turns out isn’t really a restaurant and is more of a bar for
Russian soldiers—then, after enjoying my nice morning bowl of cereal—and yes, I pour
the vodka before the cereal—I’m going to head over to the island’s single tourist
attraction: this rusted tank.
After drunkenly staring at the tank for a few hours, the temperature will have hopefully
risen above freezing, and I can make my way past the giant piles of scrap metal that litter
the entire island to take a nice, refreshing dip in Cape Krai Sveta, which, if it didn’t
already sound inviting enough, translates to “Edge of the World.”
Okay, okay, look—it’s not the most luxurious vacation spot ever, but this island’s gotta
have something going for it—I mean, after all, it is the reason that Japan and Russia
are technically still at war.
Yeah, that’s right: World War II never actually ended—at least between Japan and Russia—but,
to explain exactly why, we first need a little history lesson: The year was 1889.
A young Austrian peasant had just given birth to a tiny little baby with a tiny little mustache.
His name was—actually, y’know what?
I think you’ve heard this story.
Baby grows up, isn’t very good at painting, develops some unsavory opinions, starts a
little war with the world—you know the deal.
What matters here is what happened between Japan and the Soviet Union in 1945, as the
war was already coming to a close.
You see, despite being on opposite sides, Japan and the Soviet Union had actually signed
a neutrality pact in 1941, and hadn’t engaged in any direct conflicts since; Japan was hoping
to use the the Soviet Union as a mediator to negotiate a cushy conditional surrender
with the Allied powers when Hitler finally got around to assassinating Hitler.
The US, not wanting their shiny new bomb to go to waste, took the Soviets aside in 1945
and said, “hey, look, if you declare war on Japan, you can have that little string
of Kuril Islands after the war is over, as a treat.”
The Soviet Union, feeling a little cramped in their 8.6 million square miles of bears
and trees and natural vodka waterfalls, said “yes, we definitely need a bunch of tiny,
freezing, ghost-town islands” and invaded Japan 3 days after the bombing of Hiroshima,
which is kind of like challenging a corpse to a boxing match.
Now, the Soviets would’ve lived happily ever after on their arctic archipelago, were
it not for a poorly-written peace treaty between the Allies and Japan in 1951—this treaty,
also known as the Treaty of San Francisco, only mentioned the islands in passing, stating
that, “Japan renounces all right, title, and claim to the Kuril islands,” but didn’t
specify which islands in particular, and more importantly, didn’t mention who they were
being given to.
This ambiguity led to both Japan and the Soviet Union claiming sovereignty over the four southernmost
islands after the war, and ultimately, the Soviet Union refusing to sign the treaty.
Though World War II might be in a bit of a lull right now, there is still no “formal”
peace between Japan and Russia until a peace treaty is signed.
Surprisingly, this sort of diplomatic irregularity isn’t at all uncommon; in fact, there are
dozens of wars that have been legally extended—or never even ended—because of a screwy peace
treaty.
One of the most well-known examples is the Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years War between
the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly which lasted, believe it or not, 335 years.
It’s a long story, but basically, in the 1650s, the English Royalists were at war with
the English Parliamentarians, who were being supported by the Dutch, whose Navy was headed
up by this guy named “Tromp,” who was kind of crazy and probably shouldn’t have
been in charge.
In 1651, the Royalists had been pushed back to the Isles of Scilly, and Tromp declared
war—probably illegally—on Scilly.
When the Dutch and the Commonwealth of England signed a peace treaty in 1654, they completely
forgot that the Dutch had declared war on Scilly at all, and so it was never mentioned.
They remained, technically, in a state of war until 1986, when an historian realized
what was going on and very nobly encouraged a peace treaty instead of traveling over to
the Netherlands with a bunch of hand grenades.
Now, if it sounds like that dragged on too long, the Third Punic War only technically
ended in 1985 after 2,100 years, and the Peloponnesian War—which started in 431 BC—only got a
formal peace treaty in 1996, probably because the Athenians and Spartans had just gotten
their hands on Mario Kart 64 and realized that there are simpler ways to degrade your
neighbors than war.
Of course, if you find yourself engaged in a 2000-year war with your neighbors, you’ll
need some big technological advancements to get the upper hand.
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