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. Beginning in 2000, Hometown Village, a retirement community for first generation Sakhalins, has operated in Ansan.
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 to encompass 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
Between Japan and Russia
Origins
The earliest record of Koreans living on Sakhalin comes from the Russian Empire census of 1897, which lists 67 Koreans residing on the island. Some were prisoners belonging to the island's penal colony. Sakhalin would later be invaded during the Russo-Japanese War, and its southern half would be annexed by Japan in 1905. Five years later, the Korean peninsula would also be annexed by Japan.
In the 1910s, the Mitsui Group began recruiting labourers from the peninsula for their mining operations. In 1920, there were fewer than one thousand Koreans in the whole of Karafuto Prefecture, overwhelmingly male. The Russian Revolution of 1917 resulted in an influx of refugees from the Maritimes, who escaped to Karafuto. There would be over a thousand Koreans who were present during the Japanese occupation of northern Sakhalin. With some being hired by Mitsubishi's mining division to work in coal mines. At least 330 Koreans who worked in northern Sakhalin would resettle in Karafuto after 1925, and 487 would remain in the north. By the late 1920s, the Koreans of Soviet Sakhalin would have Korean language schools in Okha and Rybnovsk, with their population rising to 3,000 by 1932.
Nonetheless, the Korean population in Sakhalin remained relatively small. As late as the mid-1930s, there were fewer than 6,000 Koreans in Karafuto prefecture.
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 harbor Japanese spies, led to the 1937 deportation of Koreans from Soviet-controlled northern Sakhalin and the Russian Far East, to Central Asia.
In 1937, the deportation of Soviet Koreans to Central Asia resulted in the displacement of 1,155 Koreans from Sakhalin. Some 2,000 Koreans remained in northern Sakhalin, primarily working for the . Contradicting the USSR's stated aim for the deportations, Japan was allowed to bring in additional workers with Soviet permission. These oil facilities operated until 1943.
The enactment of 1938's State General Mobilization Law resulted in the mobilization and forced migration of Korean laborers. The Japanese government sought to increase the population of the sparsely populated prefecture. In order to ensure their control of southern Sakhalin, and fill the increasing demands of the coal mines and lumber yards. This mobilization can be separated into three phases: One of semi-forced mobilization from September 1939 to February 1942 driven by private concerns. State-organized recruitment due to the Pacific War from February 1942 to September 1944. Then completely forced "labor duty" from September 1944 to August 1945. At one point, over 150,000 Koreans were relocated to work on the island. Of those, around 10,000 miners were relocated to work in Ibaraki and Kyushu's mines prior to the war's end. Present-day Sakhalin Koreans' efforts to locate them proved futile.
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. Has photos. 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.
One interviewee in 2016 shared her family's experience:
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's similar, more successful efforts among the Zainichi Koreans). During the late 1950s, it became increasingly difficult for the Sakhalin Koreans to obtain Soviet citizenship, and a growing proportion chose instead to become North Korean citizens rather than to deal with the burdens of remaining stateless, which included severe restrictions on their freedom of movement and the requirement to apply for permission from the local government in order to travel outside of Sakhalin. As of 1960, only 25% had been able to secure Soviet citizenship; 65% had declared North Korean citizenship, with the remaining 10% choosing to remain unaffiliated despite the difficulties this entailed. However, as relations between the Soviet Union and North Korea deteriorated, the authorities acted to de-emphasise Korean language education and reduce the influence of North Korea within the community; by the early 1970s, Sakhalin Koreans were once again encouraged to apply for Soviet citizenship.
Attention from the outside world In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the situation of the Sakhalin Koreans improved as the outside world began to pay much more attention to their situation. Starting in 1966, Park No Hak, a former Sakhalin Korean who had earlier received permission to leave Sakhalin and settle in Japan due to having a Japanese wife, petitioned the Japanese government a total of 23 times to discuss the issue of the Sakhalin Koreans with the Soviet government.