evidence: Why should Tokyo today want seriously to amend an agreement it signed and ratified almost 50 years ago? The story begins with Japan’s 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty with the Allied Powers. Article 2(c) of the treaty said unequivocally that Japan would renounce all rights, title and claim to the Kuril islands chain (Chishima Retto) and southern Sakhalin (Karafuto) — territories to the north of Japan that Japan had controlled up till 1945. But Japan’s Foreign Ministry insists that Japan never recognized Etorofu and Kunashiri to be included in those renounced Kuril islands. [...] To get round this rather incriminating detail, the Foreign Ministry had to begin to emphasize how the English version of the San Francisco treaty uses the word Kuril Islands. This, it insists, can refer only to the Northern Kurils. Why? Because that was the alleged meaning of the Russian word "Kuril" in 19th-century treaties with Japan. This, despite the fact that at San Francisco, Minami Chishima was always translated by the Japanese side as "Southern Kurils."