The two powerful neighbouring nations of Russia and Japan have recently been striving to improve their frosty relations. At a summit earlier this month the Russian and Japanese leaders agreed to try to sign a peace treaty by the year 2000. Oddly, the two countries are technically still at war because Japan claims four windswept islands ceded to Russia after World War Two. Access to these islands - which Russia calls the southern Kuriles and Japan calls the northern territories - was long forbidden to outsiders. But restrictions are now being eased, and Simon Winchester seized the chance to sample life in this remote outpost in the Pacific.

Some years ago I stood on a high headland on the far northern tip of the Japanese island of Hokkaido, through powerful binoculars - costing 100 yen a minute - I gazed across the sea to one of the stranger and most unyielding legacies of the Second World War. A couple of miles away, shimmering in the sea-haze, rose a tiny island, and on the island was a small wooden hut. A ragged flag flew over it, and a couple of men could just be seen idling by the door. They seemed to be in uniform, and they were carrying guns.

What kept me and a score of Japanese tourists all gazing through the binoculars, pumping in coin after coin, was that the flag was the tricolour of the Russian republic, and the men soldiers of the Russian army. They were standing on an island that until the very last days of the war, had been indisputably Japanese territory: they were so close you felt you could shout at them. Several Japanese tried to: "Get out," they cried, "go home!"

Last week I happened to see the situation in reverse. I had been travelling on a rusty Russian icebreaker, going between Kamchatka and Vladivostok, and the captain, acting on a whim, decided to stop in the southern Kuriles. He did so because he knew I was interested, and to underline his own passionate belief that these misty, slippery, windswept and foggy rocks were as Russian as the islands in St Petersburg's harbour. Thus I found myself on an island called Kunashir, taking tea with the very Russians whom the Japanese gaze down at, and whom they demand should leave.

Statesmen of the far away and the long ago were responsible for this bizarre situation: when Stalin met with Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta in 1945, the Soviet leader promised that his army would join the war against the Japanese on condition, among many, that the Kuriles could be declared totally Soviet territory. The Westerners innocently agreed, caring little for the Japanese fishermen and farmers who lived on what the Japanese then called their Northern Territories. So once the war was over the Japanese were all deported back to Japan: a handful of Russian soldiers and settlers promptly moved in; and the problem has festered ever since, an irritation that has kept Japan and Russia from ever formally ending their own state of war.

And yet, seeing the islands at first hand, one has to wonder at the madness of it all. The four islands that the Russians occupy are lonely, wretched ruins, settled by disconsolate people, guarded by a demoralised rag-bag of boy soldiers who all want to go home, away from the eternal fogs and the bone-chilling cold.

The capital is a bleak shanty-town called Yuzhno-Kurilsk, still only half recovered from having been swamped by a tidal wave five years ago: there is no wharf, the tender that brought me in from the icebreaker had to tie up against a sunk and sagging wreck, from where - after an hour's scrutiny of my papers by a dozen or more border guards - I was allowed in, up a dusty street strewn with fish-bones and sick-looking dogs. The houses were in ruins, a few whey-faced inhabitants stood queuing for bread and beer. The only sign of modernity was a white Japanese fishing boat lying in the harbour, it had been arrested for illegal netting in these aggressively patrolled Russian waters.

I spoke to some soldiers: they had had no pay for six months, no letters from their homes in Khabarovsk and Irkutsk, they had nothing to do other than to be present, to do the bidding of politicians in a Moscow which was thousands of miles and eight time zones away. It seemed lunacy, said one: why don't we just let the Japanese have the islands back? They are of no use to us. At least the Japanese would put some money in, spruce up the houses, make something of the place. But his officer heard him talking, and bade him shut up. No Japanese, he said. Never.

But then this man took me in his old jeep to a headland at the south of the island. Across a narrow strait of blue and tide-ripped water, where great red buoys marked the international boundary, rose the cliffs of Hokkaido. I looked through the soldier's binoculars. In the distance I spotted a gleaming Japanese car climbing a winding Japanese road, heading towards a collection of modern buildings that were topped by what seemed to be a viewing stand. Yes, that's where I had been, five years before.

Up there maybe tourists were looking down at us, at this ragged Russian soldier, this unidentified civilian, perhaps wondering what we were talking about. Well, I can tell them: What is Japan really like? the soldier was asking me, over and over again. They say it is much more advanced than Russia: I would so like to see it for myself. But then he spat. Until this situation changes, he said, I can never go, I can never find out. Until those fools in Moscow change their minds, he said, these binoculars, they'll just have to do.

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