Russia has arrested a Japanese journalist on the far eastern island of Sakhalin and accused him of spying, The Guardian reported, in the latest and most personal sign yet of how badly relations between Moscow and Tokyo have curdled. The reporter, identified by Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova as Yuki Imai of the Hokkaido Shimbun newspaper, stands accused of “conducting espionage activities on Russian territory.” As Al Jazeera noted, the Federal Security Service detained him on Tuesday as he was preparing to leave the country the next day.
The choreography was not subtle. According to Russia’s Tass news agency, Imai — a correspondent at his paper’s bureau in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk — was allegedly collecting information on Russia’s defence capabilities, and the FSB claims he intended to pass it to Japanese intelligence. The agency then published a video of masked officers storming a hotel room, forcing a man to the floor and handcuffing him. He was flown to Moscow, where a court ordered pre-trial detention; it did not say when the arrest or the hearing took place. Russian media reported he will be held until December 12. The charges carry up to 20 years in prison.
Both governments then performed their assigned roles. Japan’s foreign ministry summoned the Russian ambassador in Tokyo, Nikolay Nozdrev, on Wednesday, and an official told Agence France-Presse that the embassy in Moscow and the consulate general in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk had requested “the prompt provision of information, as well as for humanitarian consideration and fair and impartial treatment.” The Hokkaido Shimbun said it was “still confirming the details” and that “ensuring the safety of the journalist is our top priority.” Zakharova, for her part, called it “regrettable” that Tokyo would “use its correspondents in Russia … to gather information aimed at undermining the security of our state,” and added that this was “not an isolated case.”
That last remark is worth taking seriously, though perhaps not in the way she meant. Russia has arrested several citizens of countries it classifies as “unfriendly” in recent years, accusing them of working for western intelligence services. The template is well established at this point, because everyone watched it run once before: in 2023, the American reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested on espionage charges, sentenced to 16 years, and released in a 2024 prisoner swap. Which is to say the mechanism here is not really the criminal case. Arrest, conviction, long sentence, exchange — the system produces tradable foreigners at one end and lets them go at the other, at a negotiated price. A detained journalist is less a defendant than an asset, and assets are booked to be sold.
The backdrop is a relationship that has been deteriorating since Tokyo joined western sanctions over the war in Ukraine, earning itself a place on Moscow’s “unfriendly” list. Layered on top is the older wound: the dispute over the Kuril island chain, known in Japan as the Northern Territories, seized by Soviet forces in the final days of the second world war. About 17,000 Japanese citizens were forced to leave, gradually replaced by a similar number of Russians. Japan claims the four islands nearest its territory — the closest is less than 4km from Hokkaido. In 2022, Moscow scrapped a programme that let former residents visit ancestral graves on the islands, in protest at Japan’s support for Ukraine. In August, Vladimir Putin visited one of the disputed islands himself, causing an uproar in Tokyo, which has said it will keep implementing sanctions and backing Ukraine.
A Sakhalin correspondent for a Hokkaido paper sits, in other words, at the precise intersection of every grievance the two countries hold: the disputed islands are visible from his newspaper’s home turf, and the function of his posting is to watch a place Moscow considers strategically sensitive. The FSB’s case says he watched too closely. Tokyo now faces the arithmetic Gershkovich’s employers and government already worked through: the sentence comes first, and the price of the swap gets discussed afterwards.