The house where Hirotoshi Kawata spent his boyhood, until his family fled Soviet troops in 1945, is no longer standing.

But 84-year-old Mr Kawata is so desperate to return to Taraku, one of the Habomai Islands off the northern tip of Japan, that he says he’s willing to take a tent and live rough just so he can go “home”.

Mr Kawata, along with surviving islanders and descendants of the 17,300 Japanese who were evicted from Japan’s Northern Territories after Japan’s surrender in 1945, is pinning his hopes on a meeting that is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon in Moscow between Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, and Vladimir Putin, his Russian counterpart.

The two leaders will discuss the future of the islands, which Moscow refers to as the Southern Kurils, as well as economic cooperation.

Tokyo has proposed that the Habomai archipelago and Shikotan be returned to Japanese control and that the two governments move forward on joint development of the remaining two disputed islands, Etorofu and Kunashiri.

The diplomatic row over these windswept and remote islands has soured relations since 1945 to the point that the two governments have never signed a peace treaty to formally end the Second World War.