Koreans Trapped on the Sakhalin Islands for Decades

After the Japanese annexed the Korean Peninsula in 1910, and took control of Sakhalin Island as well, many young people from southern Korea were lured to Sakhalin by the promise of good-paying jobs in the fishing and mining industries. During the 1930s and early 1940s, thousands of Koreans moved to the island, which had been disputed territory between Japan and the Soviet Union.

When Japan lost World War II in 1945, the Soviets grabbed Sakhalin and sent ethnic Japanese on the island back home. In the turmoil of the last days of war, rumors started that the Koreans were spying for the USSR, prompting a massacre of some 20,000 Sakhalin Koreans by the Japanese. After the Japanese surrender, the tens of thousands of Koreans on Sakhalin assumed that they would get to return to Korea, too. However, the Soviets barred them from leaving. The Korean War was soon to erupt, and Sakhalin's Koreans were from the south - so early Cold War politics kept them from being repatriated.

In 1974, the Soviet leadership decided that it would like to get rid of the most vocal Korean Sakhaliners, so it allowed them to apply for relocation to Japan. However, an embarrassingly large number applied to leave, so the Soviets did an about-face and cut off exits. They even forcibly deported some of the noisiest dissidents to North Korea, where they disappeared into Kim Il Sung's gulags.

In 1985, as the glasnost and perestroika began in the Soviet Union, Japan once more offered to help repatriate the Sakhalin Koreans. By this time, though, few of them had any interest in trying to return to Korea. Today, some 45,000 people of Korean descent live on the Russian island of Sakhalin.