Everything about Sakhalin Koreans totally explained
Sakhalin Koreans (
Russian: Сахалинские корейцы/
Sakhalinskie Koreytsi or Корейцы Сахалина/
Koreytsi Sakhalina;
Korean: 사할린 한국인/
Sahallin Hangugin) are Russian or residents of Korean descent living on
Sakhalin Island who 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; the Japanese government 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 couldn't 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 to 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 didn't 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 to take advantage of the low wages there; at one point, over 150,000 Koreans worked 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 wouldn't 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 wasn't 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.
The Soviet invasion and Japanese massacres
The Soviet Union invaded the Japanese portion of Sakhalin on
August 11,
1945, resulting the deaths of 20,000 civilians. 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
August 18,
1945, and the incident in Mizuho Village (now Pozharskoye), which lasted from
August 20 to
August 23,
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 neighbours, killing 27 between August 20th and 23rd.
Integration into the Soviet Union
Repatriation refused
In the years after the Soviet invasion, most of the 400,000 Japanese civilians who hadn't 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 couldn't be repatriated to the southern half of the Korean peninsula due to the political situation; 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.
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 didn't 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
Juche 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 to than 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. 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. At the same time, Rei Mihara, a Tokyo housewife, formed a similar pressure group in Japan, and 18 Japanese lawyers attempted to sue the Japanese government to force them to accept diplomatic and financial responsibility for the transportation of the Sakhalin Koreans and their return to South Korea. By 1976, only 2,000 more of their population had been able to obtain permission to depart from Sakhalin, but that year, the Sakhalin government made a public announcement that people seeking to emigrate to South Korea could simply show up at the Immigration Office to file an application. Within a week, they'd received more than 800 such applications, including some from North Korean citizens; this caused the North Korean embassy to complain to their Soviet counterparts the new emigration policy. The Soviet authorities in the end chose for unspecified reasons to
refuse to issue exit visas to most of those concerned, leading to the unusual case of public demonstrations about the refusals by Korean families. This level of open dissent provoked the authorities to completely reverse their liberalising stance towards the Sakhalin Koreans; they arrested more than 40 people protestors and in November 1976 deported them, but to North Korea rather than to the South as they desired. Further purges and intimidation of those seeking to emigrate also followed. the Soviet Union also began to liberalize their emigration laws in 1987. As of
2001, Japan spends US$ 1.2 million a year to fund Sakhalin Koreans' visits to Seoul. The Foreign Ministry allocated about $5 million to build a cultural centre in Sakhalin,
However, not all of the atrocities committed against the Sakhalin Koreans have been redressed. In August 1991, the descendants of the victims of the 1945 massacres filed a joint lawsuit in the
Tokyo District Court seeking compensation, but the suit was dismissed in July 1995.
The foreign trade of Sakhalin with Japan is still roughly four times that with Korea, and Japanese companies greatly outnumber their Korean on the island. As a result, while members of the first generation still carry
anti-Japanese sentiment, the younger generations have developed an interest in
Japanese culture and have taken up the
study of the Japanese language, much to the consternation of their elders. On
October 28,
2006, a Korean student from the
Sakhalin State University placed second in the All-
CIS Japanese Language Students Competition.
North and South Korean influence
During the 1990s, commerce, communication, and direct flights opened up between Sakhalin and
South Korea, and the two Koreas began to vie openly for influence among the Sakhalin Koreans. Television and radio programmes from both North and South Korea, as well as local programming, began to be broadcast on Sakhalin Korean Broadcasting, the only Korean television station in all of Russia. North Korea negotiated with Russia for closer economic relations with Sakhalin, and recently sponsored an art show in
Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. They have also permitted delegations of Sakhalin Koreans to visit relatives in North Korea.
South Korea and Japan jointly funded the building of a nursing home for elderly Sakhalin Koreans in
Ansan, a
suburb of Seoul, and under the auspices of the Korean
Red Cross, 1,544 people had settled there and in other locations
by the end of 2002, while another 14,122 had travelled to South Korea on short-term visits at Japanese government expense. South Korean investors also began to participate in the international tenders for works contracts to develop the Sakhalin Shelf, as they're interested in the potential supply of
liquefied natural gas. By the year 2000, South Korean missionaries had opened several churches, and South Koreans comprised the majority of
international students at the
Sakhalin State University. In addition to the elderly, a few younger Koreans have also chosen to move to South Korea, either to find their roots, or for economic reasons, as wages in South Korea are as much as three times those in Sakhalin. However, upon arrival, they often find that they're viewed as foreigners by the South Korean locals, despite their previous exposure to Korean culture in Sakhalin. As one returnee put it, "Sakhalin Koreans live in a different world than Sakhalin Russians but that world isn’t Korea". Of the 1,544 Koreans who repatriated to South Korea
as of 2005, nearly 10% eventually returned to Sakhalin.
Local interethnic relations
In the late 1980s, suspicions against the Sakhalin Koreans remained. With the relaxation of
internal migration controls and the
collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians began moving
en masse back to the mainland, making ethnic Koreans an increasing proportion of the population; there were fears that they might become a majority of the island's population, and seek an
autonomous republic or even independence. However, the rise of the regional economy and the cultural assimilation of the younger generations drove more than 95% of Koreans to stay in Sakhalin or move to the
Russian Far East rather than leave for South Korea, as they've come to consider Russia their home country. The Sakhalin Koreans' family connections in South Korea have benefitted even those who remained on Sakhalin with easier access to South Korean business and imports; trade with South Korea has brought the Sakhalin Koreans a
better economic standing than the average resident of Sakhalin. By 2004, inter-ethnic resentment between Russians and Koreans had improved greatly and were generally not described as being a problem on Sakhalin. However, Sakhalin Koreans who have travelled to the mainland of Russia, or have relocated to there (a population of roughly 10,000), report that they've encountered various forms of racism.
Among the Koreans who remain on Sakhalin, roughly 7,000 of the original generation of settlers survive, while their locally-born descendants make up the rest of the local Korean population. Around thirty percent of Sakhalin’s thirty thousand Koreans still have not taken Russian citizenship.
Culture
Personal and family names
» See also List of Korean family names and Cyrillization of Korean.
Korean surnames, when Cyrillized, may be spelled slightly differently from the romanisations used in the US; the resulting common pronunciations also differ, as can be seen in the table at right. Furthermore,
Korean naming practises and
Russian naming practises conflict in several important ways. While most members of the older generations of Sakhalin Koreans used Korean names, members of the younger generations favor their Russian names. However, with the increasing exposure to South Korean pop culture, some younger Koreans have named their children after characters in
Korean television dramas. Additionally, during the Soviet era, Sakhalin Koreans were often hired to act as announcers and writers for official media aimed at the
Koryo-saram in Central Asia. However, unlike the
Koryo-saram, the spoken
Korean of Sakhalin isn't very closely related to
Hamgyŏng dialect or
Koryo-mar, but is instead descended from
Jeolla and
Gyeongsang dialects. As a result of the diplomatic situation up until the 1980s, during which South Korea had no relations with the Soviet Union, Korean-language instructional materials were provided by North Korea or developed domestically. Oddly enough, as a result, Sakhalin Koreans' writing, like that of Koryo-saram, follows the North Korean standard, but their spoken Korean in radio broadcasts has come to resemble the
Seoul dialect of South Korea.
Religion
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been significant growth in religious activities among the Sakhalin Koreans; the establishment of churches was noted in scholarly articles as early as 1990. Christian hymns have become popular listening material, supplementing the more typical Russian, Western, and Korean pop music. The
Saegoryeo Shinmun regularly publishes sermons written by the popular South Korean pastor
Jaerock Lee. Korean churches also broadcast religious content through Sakhalin Korean Broadcasting; a Baptist church run by ethnic Koreans sponsors a journalist there. However, large-scale religious events can be subjected to restriction by the government authorities: in June 1998 the local Russian Orthodox Church and the regional administration of Sakhalin successfully pressured Korean Presbyterian missionaries to cancel a conference of more than 100 Presbyterian and other Protestant missionaries from around the former Soviet Union.
Music
In one survey, a third of the Sakhalin Korean population expressed a preference for traditional Korean music, a far higher proportion than in any other ethnic Korean community surveyed. However, despite their better knowledge of Korean language, the same survey showed that Korean pop music is less widespread among Sakhalin Koreans than among ethnic Koreans in Kazakhstan, possessing about the same degree of popularity as in Uzbekistan. Sakhalin Koreans also reported listening to Western popular and classical music at much lower rates than Koreans in the rest of the former Soviet Union.
Prominent Sakhalin Koreans
- Park Hae Yong, head of the Korean Residents' Association on Sakhalin
- Kim Chun Ja, editor in chief of Sakhalin Korean Broadcasting
- Lee Hoesung, Zainichi Korean author, born in Karafuto and later repatriated to Japan
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