Abe can hardly please both the US and Russia

Many issues in Japan's foreign policy are legacies of World War II. However, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has seemed determined to try and settle two of them in the last month of this year.

One of them is the row over four islets seized by the Soviet Union in the closing days of the war. Abe treated Russian President Vladimir Putin to a visit to hot springs in his ancestral hometown of Nagato in Yamaguchi prefecture on Thursday in the hope that a close personal relationship will help him make a breakthrough. The territorial dispute has stood in the way of a peace treaty between the two countries since the end of the war.

His onsen diplomacy, however, did not move Putin to concede the isles, known as Northern Territories in Japan and the Southern Kurils in Russia. Putin walked away with deals on economic cooperation, including Japan's consent to starting talks on joint projects on the disputed islands under a "special framework". Still, Putin has insisted that joint economic activities on the four isles be done under Russia's sovereignty.