{"id":13669,"date":"2023-08-03T04:07:53","date_gmt":"2023-08-02T22:37:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=13669"},"modified":"2025-04-02T06:17:14","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T00:47:14","slug":"kuril-islands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/kuril-islands\/","title":{"rendered":"Kuril Islands"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><strong>About<\/strong> <strong>Kuril Islands<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>These are a <strong>set of four islands <\/strong>situated <strong>between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean near<\/strong> the north of Japan&#8217;s northernmost prefecture, Hokkaido.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Japan refers to them <strong>as Northern territories,<\/strong> Russia calls them the Kuril Islands and South Korea named them as <strong>Dokdo islands.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>These are <strong>part of the Pacific Ring of Fire<\/strong> belt and have over 100 volcanoes, of which 35 are said to be active volcanoes along with hot springs.<\/li>\n<li>Both Russia and Japan claim sovereignty over them though the islands have been under Russian control since the end of World War II.<\/li>\n<li>The <strong>Soviet Union<\/strong> had seized the islands <strong>at the end of World War II<\/strong> and by 1949 had expelled its Japanese residents.<\/li>\n<li>Tokyo claims that the disputed islands have been part of Japan since the early 19th century.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>\u00a0<\/h3>\n<h3>What lies behind the dispute?<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>According to Tokyo, Japan\u2019s sovereignty over the islands is confirmed by several treaties like <strong>the Shimoda Treaty of 1855<\/strong>, the 1875 Treaty for the exchange of Sakhalin for the Kuril Islands (Treaty of St. Petersburg), and the <strong>Portsmouth Treaty<\/strong> of 1905 signed after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05 which Japan had won.<\/li>\n<li>Russia, on the other hand, claims the <strong>Yalta Agreement<\/strong> (1945) and the Potsdam Declaration (1945) as proof of its sovereignty and argues that the <strong>San Francisco Treaty of 1951<\/strong> is legal evidence that Japan had acknowledged Russian sovereignty over the islands. Under Article 2 of the treaty, Japan had \u201crenounced all right, title and claim to the Kuril Islands.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Q1) What is the Pacific Ring of Fire?<\/h3>\n<p>The Pacific Ring of Fire, often simply referred to as the &#8220;Ring of Fire,&#8221; is a horseshoe-shaped zone in the Pacific Ocean characterized by a high level of seismic and volcanic activity. It is an area where a large number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur in the basin of the Pacific Plate and other neighboring tectonic plates.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Source:<\/strong>\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/indianexpress.com\/article\/explained\/explained-global\/could-china-take-kuril-islands-claimed-by-japan-and-russia-8869904\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><u>Could China take Kuril islands claimed by Japan and Russia?<\/u><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kuril Islands are a set of four islands situated between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean near the north of Japan&#8217;s northernmost prefecture, Hokkaido.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":13670,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-13669","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","8":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}