Russia's Arrest of Japanese Journalist Yuki Imai Signals Deepening Rift Over Islands and Influence

On October 14, officers of Russia's FSB security service walked into a hotel room in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, on Sakhalin Island, and found Yuki Imai asleep. Russian television broadcast footage of the arrest, showing the officers barging in. Imai, 34, is a correspondent for the Hokkaido Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, and Moscow says he was spying.

The accusation is that he tried to obtain information about soldiers stationed in the region, which lies near the Kuril Islands, a long-standing sore point between Russia and Japan. Russian authorities moved him quickly to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, where a court ordered him held in pretrial detention until at least December 12. According to the International Federation of Journalists, which has demanded his immediate release, he faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

This week Japanese Foreign Ministry officials were in Moscow trying to reach him. Officials from Japan's embassy there have been denied access. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has condemned the arrest and rejected the claim that Imai is a spy. Russian Ambassador Nikolay Nozdrev, as reported by the state news agency TASS, said Imai was caught "red-handed" and claimed that Japanese intelligence agencies use journalists to gather classified information in order to undermine Russia's security and defense capability.

Yoji Gomi, a veteran journalist and author who has reported across Asia, told DW that Japanese reporters may sometimes meet diplomats and exchange impressions, but he rejected the idea that they are paid spies. He argued that one-party states tend to see foreign correspondents as spies because that is how they use their own. He added that Imai was in a sensitive area, one with many North Korean laborers whom Russia wants kept out of view.

Stephen Nagy, an international relations professor at Tokyo's International Christian University, said Moscow may regard Imai as a bargaining chip to swap for Russians detained abroad. He doubts Tokyo will yield, since doing so would let any country seize a Japanese national, try them for espionage and demand a trade. "It would set a dangerous precedent," he said. The arrest follows Japan's arrest of a member of the Russia-linked hacking group Qilin, who was extradited to Germany to face charges over a 2024 cyberattack on a logistics center.

There is precedent, though of differing weight. In 2019, a journalist was arrested in Russia for allegedly trying to obtain classified information on Russia's military potential in the Far East, according to Interfax, but was quickly released. Imai's case may be the most serious since 2023, when Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested, sentenced to 16 years in a penal colony, and freed in 2024 in a prisoner exchange with Western countries.

Nagy sees the arrest as pressure on Tokyo, part of an approach coordinated with China to isolate Japan while the United States is preoccupied with domestic matters and the Middle East conflict. In his view, Moscow and Beijing want to portray Japan as still the military state of the 1930s, a threat to Indo-Pacific stability, and whether the claim is true matters little to them.

The backdrop is the dispute over islands seized by Soviet forces after Japan's surrender in World War II, called the Northern Territories in Japan and the Southern Kurils in Russia. Tokyo once hoped diplomacy could win their return, but that effort has faltered in recent years, and was further dented in spring when Japan said it would join the NATO initiative providing nonlethal aid to Kyiv. In August, Vladimir Putin visited the islands, only the second Russian leader to do so. Earlier this month a delegation of Chinese businesspeople was welcomed on one of them, and talks on economic cooperation are underway.

Tadashi Anno, a politics professor at Sophia University in Tokyo, said Japan had worked hard to keep relations stable even after condemning the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and finds the timing of Russia's hard push puzzling. What to watch next: whether diplomats gain access to Imai, whether his detention is extended beyond December 12, and whether any exchange is discussed.