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There will be no visa-free exchanges between Japanese prefectures and the southern part of the Kuril Islands this year, TASS reports. Due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Tokyo decided to abandon them.
The Association of Former Japanese Residents of the Kuril Islands stressed that it is impossible to guarantee that there is no risk of infection while traveling. The head of the public organization Hideaki Miyakawa expressed regret about this. Hopefully, he added, travel would resume next year.
Miyakawa said that the association was preparing until recently for the trip, scheduled for late September. Nevertheless, it had to be abandoned.
The first time visa-free exchanges linked the Russian Far East and Japan in the early 1990s. To this end, Moscow and Tokyo signed an intergovernmental agreement aimed at improving mutual understanding between the peoples of the two countries. For almost thirty years of the treaty, more than 8,000 inhabitants of the islands of Iturup, Kunashir and Shikotan have visited Japan, and about 19,000 Japanese visited the southern part of the Kuriles.
Russkiy Mir
