Gorbachev Facing Historic Challenge in Tokyo Visit : Diplomacy: Old enmities and a territorial dispute cloud this week’s summit just when he needs a foreign success to help his position at home.

MOSCOW —  Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, a veteran of frequent-flier diplomacy, has been grounded by domestic troubles for half a year. But this week, he will climb back into the presidential Ilyushin-62 for one of the most historic, challenging trips of his career.

For the first time in 100 years, a Russian leader of the first rank is going to Japan.

Once marred by wars and rival imperial designs, now embittered by a seemingly intractable territorial dispute, Moscow’s relations with Tokyo have been the single key foreign policy sector not to have improved dramatically since Gorbachev came to power in March, 1985.

By itself, the 45-year-old argument over four islands in the chilly North Pacific off Hokkaido would be enough to make Gorbachev’s trip maddeningly difficult. The Japanese have stubbornly refused to consider freeing investment and government aid to the Soviets until the islands, seized by the Red Army after Japan’s surrender in 1945, are returned.

Because of these bits of desolate territory, collectively as large as Delaware, World War II, in a formal sense, has never ended between Tokyo and Moscow. The Japanese refuse a peace treaty with the Soviets until Kunashiri, Etorofu, Shikotan and the Habomai group--known in Japan as the Northern Territories--are returned.

This winter, Gorbachev enchanted Japan by saying he wanted to visit in time to see the cherry trees bloom. By scheduling the April 16-19 visit, he will get his wish.

But the journey will be the acid test of whether the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize laureate can still put “Gorbymania” to use. For since Gorbachev last went abroad, in November to attend the European summit in Paris, perestroika has taken on a far different, and often ugly, face.

To foreigners, as well as his own people, Gorbachev now seems less and less an apostle of change, and increasingly a die-hard defender of the status quo.

With as many as 300,000 miners on strike, Georgia asserting its independence, discontent over price increases and other domestic concerns, some in Moscow were even expressing doubts that the 60-year-old Soviet president, who canceled a trip to Oslo to receive his Nobel Prize last December, would dare leave the country.

“President Gorbachev is under unprecedented pressure,” said Georgy F. Kunadze, a Soviet expert on Japan. “He greatly needs this trip to be a success to beef up his international image and strengthen his political position.”

By electing to be the first leader of the Soviet Union to go to Tokyo, Gorbachev is taking a big gamble. His hosts want a breakthrough on the territorial issue--and nothing less.

There has been movement of late. It was a sensation in Japan when Gorbachev, during talks with an official of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, became the first Kremlin leader in 35 years to acknowledge the “burning” dispute over the islands, known to the Soviets as the “south Kurils.”

Rumors of a pending deal have surfaced in Moscow and Tokyo, with the islands reportedly carrying a price tag of as much as $28 billion in Japanese aid to the Soviets. One of Gorbachev’s political foes accused him of planning to sell the islands for $200 billion.

“The main temptation is to say ‘yes’ (to give up the islands) and receive substantial economic aid in return--a chance to support the disintegrating Soviet economy,” observed Boris Nikolaev, a Moscow specialist on Asian affairs.

But ironically, just when it is possible for Gorbachev to talk about the problem, the shift to the right in his power base has made it dangerous for him to attempt a solution.

A senior Japanese Foreign Ministry official, denying rumors of a quid pro quo deal, has said his country will insist that Gorbachev recognize Japanese “sovereignty” over the islands. Even that formula would allow much flexibility on the actual return of territory.

According to Liberal Democratic Party sources, a Soviet acknowledgment of Japanese sovereignty would permit Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu’s government to soften its position and accept a phased reversion.

Under that blueprint, only the two smallest islands, Shikotan and Habomai, would be returned initially, as a 1956 agreement between Tokyo and Moscow had foreseen until the Soviets annulled it.

Japan supposedly would then be willing to wait for an indefinite period for the two larger islands to be handed back.

However, for the Soviet right and the military-industrial complex, the idea of giving up a piece of the motherland--even fogbound rocks 7,000 miles from Moscow where no Russian lived before 1945--is anathema.

“In no way can this territorial dispute be solved as a commercial deal. . . . It would be political suicide for Gorbachev,” Konstantin O. Sarkisov, head of the Japanese Research Center at Moscow’s Center for Oriental Studies, has warned.

Gorbachev’s No. 1 political nemesis, Russian radical Boris N. Yeltsin, also demands the right to approve or veto any territorial agreement, on grounds that the islands, home to an estimated 32,000 Soviet citizens, are a part of the Russian Republic, which he heads.

From Moscow’s point of view, a deal on the islands could set a dangerous precedent. Giving them up would throw into question the legitimacy of Soviet control over other real estate acquired as a result of World War II, for example, the secession-minded western Ukraine.

In any event, putting relations with Tokyo on a footing of genuine confidence will be a tall order for Gorbachev. Despite more than six years of perestroika, a recent opinion poll found only 32% of the Japanese trust the Soviet Union.

“We cannot remake or rewrite the history of relations between our two nations,” Gorbachev acknowledged to Japanese journalists in Moscow. “Unfortunately, there are not a few sad pages in it. In the first 45 years of this century, there were at least five wars or armed clashes.”

There have been many reasons for suspicion, even hatred, of the Japanese by the Russians. Without declaring war, Japan attacked Russia in 1904, and entered the ranks of the great imperial powers by sending a Russian fleet to the bottom. Japanese troops occupied parts of the Soviet Far East after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and won a reputation of great cruelty.

“Among our neighbors, the Japanese are the most hostile toward our social system, toward our religion,” one Soviet academic, Professor L. Valenkevich, has claimed. “They will forever be among our foes.” But such aversion is now rare. Like Americans, most Soviets these days seem to view Japan as a tempting cornucopia of automobiles, VCRs and the latest consumer gadgets.

One unpleasantness Gorbachev didn’t mention occurred a century ago. In the spring of 1891, when Nicholas II, the crown prince who was to become czar, made the last visit by a high-ranking Russian state figure to Japan, a policeman tried to kill him with a sword.

When in Tokyo, Gorbachev intends to smooth over one rancorous issue that has its roots in the past by handing over a list of an estimated 60,000 Japanese POWs who died in harsh Siberian captivity after the end of World War II.

Gorbachev has also hinted he will make a major speech on Asia-Pacific security matters. In addition, he may use his trip to remind Japanese that their alliance with America is not eternal, Besides visits to Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, he wants to stop in Nagasaki, where more than 70,000 people were killed by a U.S. atomic bomb in 1945.

Whether wooing the Japanese will have any payoff for the Soviets is uncertain. Although evincing respect for the man they familiarly call “President Go,” the Japanese increasingly consider the Soviet Union to be a black hole capable of swallowing their money without a trace.

Japanese exports to the Soviet Union fell last year to $2.56 billion from $3.08 billion; as of February, overdue Soviet debts to Japanese firms stood at $416 million.

There may be no pot of gold for the Soviets to scoop up when the feud over the islands ends.

In the words of Izvestia’s Tokyo correspondent, Sergei Agofonov, the territorial dispute is “a splendid smoke screen concealing economic reality.” Namely, that “for the Japanese, it is simply not worth getting involved in projects with the Soviet Union.”

Gorbachev’s Tokyo trip should put that thesis to the test. At any rate, the honored Soviet guest is keeping his options open. On the way home, he will stop to visit the president of South Korea, another Asian economic powerhouse contemplating large-scale involvement in development projects in Siberia and the Soviet Far East.