There are many sources of confusion：
1) The same place may be described in quite different ways between Japanese and Russian.
2) Many names come from the native language of the Ainus, and it appears that various methods have been used for conversions into Japanese and/or Russian.
3) Many of these names were written by using Chinese characters sometimes in very curious way in Japan, and later the names were pronounced in the most common reading of those Chinese characters.
4) There are several ways to describe Japanese words with Roman characters; the Hepburn (standard) method, the Japanese method, the method instructed by Japanese government and so on.
5) There are several ways to place Russian geographic names on English maps used by various map-makers, and no single standard rule is found.
We have no intention to set up the standard, but to show the list of correspondence among the names which appear frequently in documents, for the convenience of researchers in this area. In Sections 3 and 4, we shall review why and how the multilingual problem arises in the regions under consideration. As it is almost impossible to list up all variations for names, the methods and rules applied in this report will also be explained in Sections 3 and 4.
