Sakhalin Korean

Sakhalin Koreans are Russian citizens and residents of Korean descent living on Sakhalin Island, who can trace their roots to the immigrants from the Gyeongsang and Jeolla provinces of Korea during the late 1930s and early 1940s, the latter half of the Japanese colonial era.

At the time, the southern half of Sakhalin Island, then known as Karafuto Prefecture, was under the control of the Empire of Japan, whereas the northern half was part of the Soviet Union. The Japanese government both recruited and forced Korean labourers into service and shipped them to Karafuto to fill labour shortages resulting from World War II. The Red Army invaded Karafuto days before Japan's surrender; while all but a few Japanese there repatriated successfully, almost one-third of the Koreans could not secure permission to depart either to Japan or their home towns in South Korea. For the next forty years, they lived in exile. In 1985, the Japanese government offered transit rights and funding for the repatriation of the original group of Sakhalin Koreans; however, only 1,500 of them returned to South Korea in the next two decades. The vast majority of Koreans of all generations chose instead to stay on Sakhalin.

Due to differing language and immigration history, Sakhalin Koreans may or may not identify themselves as Koryo-saram. The term "Koryo-saram" may be used encompass to all Koreans in the former USSR, but typically refers to ethnic Koreans from Hamgyŏng province whose ancestors emigrated to the Russian Far East in the 19th century, and then were later deported to Central Asia. The issue of self-identification is complicated by the fact that many Sakhalin Koreans feel that Koreans from Central Asia look down on them.

History

Under Japanese colonialism

Origins

Korean immigration to Sakhalin began as early as the 1910s when the Mitsui Group began recruiting labourers from the peninsula for their mining operations. In 1920, ten years after the annexation of Korea by Japan, there were fewer than one thousand Koreans in the whole of Karafuto Prefecture, overwhelmingly male. Aside from an influx of refugees from the Maritimes, who escaped to Karafuto during the Russian Revolution of 1917, the number of Koreans in the province did not rise very rapidly; as late as the mid-1930s, there were fewer than 6,000 Koreans in Karafuto. However, as Japan's war effort picked up, the Japanese government sought to put more people on the ground in the sparsely-populated prefecture in order to ensure their control of the territory and fill the increasing demands of the coal mines and lumber yards. Recruiters turned to sourcing workers from the Korean peninsula; at one point, over 150,000 Koreans were relocated to work on the island. Of those, around 10,000 mine workers were relocated to Japan prior to the war's end; present-day Sakhalin Koreans' efforts to locate them proved futile.

The Imperial Japanese Army in Karafuto frequently used local ethnic minorities (Oroks, Nivkhs, and Ainu) to conduct intelligence-gathering activities, because, as indigenous inhabitants, their presence would not arouse suspicion on the Soviet half of the island. Ethnic Koreans could also be found on both sides of the border, but the use of Koreans as spies was not common, as the Karafuto police were wary of the support for the independence movement among Koreans. Soviet suspicion towards Korean nationalism, along with fears that the Korean community might harbour Japanese spies, led to the 1937 deportation of Koreans from Soviet-controlled northern Sakhalin and the Russian Far East, to Central Asia.

After the large scale deportation of Soviet Koreans to Central Asia, the few who were not deported continued to live in northern Sakhalin. Some 2,000 Koreans remained in northern Sakhalin as part of Soviet-Japanese oil 'concessions' (joint ventures). Contradicting the Soviet stated aim for the deportation, Japan was allowed to bring in additional workers with Soviet permission, and the facilities operated until 1943.

The origins of Sakhalin Koreans are traced to the Japanese-controlled southern half of the island.

Soviet invasion and Japanese massacres

The Soviet Union invaded the Japanese portion of Sakhalin on 11 August 1945 during the Soviet–Japanese War towards the end of World War II. In the confusion that ensued, a rumour began to spread that ethnic Koreans could be serving as spies for the Soviet Union, and led to massacres of Koreans by Japanese police and civilians. Despite the generally limited amount of information about the massacres, two examples of massacres are comparatively well-known today: the incident in Kamishisuka (now Leonidovo) on 18 August 1945, and the incident in Mizuho Village (now Pozharskoye), which lasted from 20 to 23 August 1945.

In Kamishisuka, the Japanese police arrested 19 Koreans on charges of spy activities; 18 were found shot within the police station the next day. The sole survivor, a Korean known only by his Japanese name Nakata, had survived by hiding in a toilet; he later offered testimony about the event. In Mizuho Village, Japanese fleeing Soviet troops who had landed at Maoka (now Kholmsk) claimed that the Koreans were cooperating with the Red Army and that they were pillaging Japanese property. Though Koreans and Japanese worked alongside each other in the village on farms and construction projects, the Japanese civilians turned against their Korean neighbors, killing 27 between 20 and 23 August. Other individual Koreans may have been killed to cover up evidence of Japanese atrocities committed during the evacuation: one woman interviewed by a US-Russian joint commission investigating the issue of Allied prisoners of war held by the Imperial Japanese Army in camps on Sakhalin reported that her ethnic Korean lover had been murdered by Japanese troops after he had witnessed mass shootings of hundreds of American prisoners of war.

Integration into the Soviet Union

Repatriation refused

In the years after the Soviet invasion, most of the 400,000 Japanese civilians who had not already been evacuated during the war left voluntarily under the auspices of the US-USSR Agreement on Repatriation of those left in the USSR, signed in December 1946. Many of the 150,000 Koreans on the island safely returned to mainland Japan, and some went to the northern half of the Korean peninsula; however, roughly 43,000 were not accepted for repatriation by Japan, and also could not be repatriated to the southern half of the Korean peninsula due to the political situation. The Soviet government initially had drawn up plans to repatriate the Koreans along with the Japanese, but the local administration on Sakhalin objected, arguing that incoming Russians from the mainland would not be sufficient to replace the skilled labourers who had already departed. The indecision about the ultimate fate of the Sakhalin Koreans persisted until the outbreak of the Korean War, after which repatriation became a political impossibility. Some sources claim Stalin himself blocked their departure because he wanted to retain them as coal miners on the island. In 1957, Seoul appealed for Tokyo's assistance to secure the departure of ethnic Koreans from Sakhalin via Japan, but Tokyo took no real action on the request, and blamed Soviet intransigence for the lack of progress in resolving the issue; Japan continued its earlier policy of granting entrance only to Sakhalin Koreans who were married to Japanese citizens, or had a Japanese parent.

During the late 1940s, the ranks of ethnic Koreans on the island were augmented by another 8,000 North Korean expatriates, recruited by the Soviet government to work in state-owned fisheries.

In an effort to integrate the Korean labourers, who were unfamiliar with the Soviet system and unable to speak Russian, local authorities set up schools using the Korean language as the medium of instruction. However, the Sakhalin Koreans were believed to have been "infected with the Japanese spirit", and so for the most part the authorities did not trust them to run any of their own collective farms, mills, factories, schools, or hospitals. Instead, these tasks were left to several hundred ethnic Koreans imported from Central Asia, who were bilingual in Russian and Korean. Resentment towards the social dominance of Koreans from Central Asia over the Sakhalin Koreans led to tensions between the two groups; the latter developed a number of disparaging terms in Korean to refer to the former.

The Sakhalin government's policy towards the Sakhalin Koreans continued to shift in line with bilateral relations between North Korea and the Soviet Union. During the 1950s, North Korea demanded that the Soviets treat Sakhalin Koreans as North Korean citizens, and, through their consulate, even set up study groups and other educational facilities for them (analogous to Chongryon

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