On September 5, 1905, Russia and Japan signed the Treaty of Portsmouth at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire, ending the Russo-Japanese War. Sergei Witte signed for Russia and Komura Jutaro for Japan, and President Theodore Roosevelt had brokered the talks over five weeks of negotiations.
Japan had won nearly every battle on land and at sea but was running out of money, while Russia had lost its fleet at Tsushima and faced revolution at home yet still had an army in Manchuria, and that mismatch is what made a negotiated settlement possible at all. Witte's position was that Russia had lost battles and not the war, and he refused to pay a single kopeck in indemnity. Japan dropped that demand and took territory instead: the southern half of Sakhalin, the Liaodong lease, and the South Manchurian Railway.
The refusal to pay became the story back home. Riots broke out in Tokyo. The government declared martial law. Nobody paid an indemnity. In Russia, Witte was nicknamed Half-Sakhalin and got the credit for ending a war the government needed to end.
Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for the mediation, the first American to win one. The treaty recognised Japan's dominant position in Korea, which became a Japanese protectorate that year and a colony in 1910. Japan broke the treaty by occupying Manchuria in 1931, and it lapsed after Japan's surrender in 1945.