User blog comment:KatDWolf/Relationships/@comment-98.156.52.56-20100601043002

I was wondering about this myself, so I asked my dad, a history buff, and this is the copied-and-pasted answers he gave me:

For 1) Turkey and Japan are on friendly terms because there is an old story where the nephew of the Japanese emperor visited Turkey in 1890 or so and because of that the Turkish Sultan sent a ship to Japan with gifts and those gifts were delivered by the Turkish Navy ship to the emperor back in Japan and then started to sail back....the ship ran into a nasty Japanese taiphoon and the ship went down, killing over 600 Turkisch sailors....The Japanese emperor helped the survivors, sent a ship full of donations from the Japanese people to the families of the drowned Turkish sailors and of course that was seen as a very nice gesture by the Turks....and so there is this nice and warm feeling between Japan and Turkey from way back....Funny thing is that technically Japan and Turkey were on opposite camps during WW II but since they never really fought each other, it did not matter much....

For 2) Russia and China are much friendlier then they used to be during the Cold War (a war that is not done by shooting at each other but by spying on each other, badmouthing on each other and trying nasty things to each other all the while saying there is no real issue......) The Sino-Soviet split took place in the 1060's when there were border conflicts between China and Russia and there was even a bit of shooting......Russia used to help China a lot because they were both communist and the theory is that communists are supposed to help each other.  Between 1945 and 1965 or so there were tons of Russian advisors helping the Chinese building factories and such and lots of Chinese students went to Russia for university but when the border dispute started, Mao, the leader of China went about face and thought that Russia is more of an enemy then a friend.....plus China wanted to be more friendly with the US (that is when the Chinese invited the US President Nixon to visit, pissing off the Russians big time.....and now you have 1000 MacDonald's in China and lots of Chinese in America so you can see that that worked pretty well.... For 3) Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania used to be independent countries until WW II when Soviet Union decided to "liberate" those countries and add them to the Soviet UNION (that why it was a Union, because Soviet Union added countries left and right to make themselves bigger and more protected.....After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, all these so-called liberated countries really liberated themselves by getting themselves out of this Soviet Union and became independent again...., so they stopped living in the Russia house.....