Tag: Sakhalin

More Ethnic Koreans Leave Russia’s Sakhalin Island to Move to South Korea

| November 29, 2021

The trickle of ethnic Koreans from Russia’s Sakhalin island continue to trickle back to South Korea:

This file photo, taken in November 2019, shows ethnic Koreans, who were taken to Russia’s far eastern island of Sakhalin during Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule, arriving at Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul. (Yonhap)

Twenty-one ethnic Koreans who were taken to Russia’s far eastern island of Sakhalin for forced labor during Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule returned to their home country Saturday, the foreign ministry said.

A total of 91 people, including the former forced laborers and their family members, arrived at Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul, under a government support project that will help them get permanent residency here or get dual citizenship if they apply. They all have Russian citizenship.

The average age of the ethnic Koreans who were relocated to Sakhalin during World War II was 88, with the oldest one at age 90.

After a 10-day quarantine, the returnees and their family members will reside in rental homes in Ansan, 42 kilometers south of Seoul, and Incheon, 40 km west of the capital.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Korean Families Look to Find Relatives Lost During World War II on Sakhalin Island

| August 13, 2020

This seems like an almost impossible task for Korean families members trying to find out what happened to their relatives that were conscripted to work on Sakhalin Island during World War II:

South Korean Shin Yun-sun shows photos of her 92-year-old mother, Baek Bong-rye, during an interview at her house in Seoul, South Korea Wednesday, July 29, 2020. Shin, 75, has spent decades pestering government officials, digging into records and searching burial grounds on Russia’s desolate Sakhalin island, desperately searching for traces of a father she never met. Shin wants to bring back the remains of her presumably dead father for her ailing mother. Japan’s colonial government conscripted Shin’s father for forced labor from their farming village in September 1943, when Baek was pregnant with Shin.

Historians say Japan forcibly mobilized around 30,000 Koreans as workers during the late 1930s and 1940s on what was then called Karafuto, or the Japanese-occupied southern half of Sakhalin, near the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.

They endured grueling labor in coal mines and logging and construction sites as part of Imperial Japan’s wartime economy, which became heavily dependent on conscripted Korean labor when Japanese men were sent to war fronts.

Families thought their loved ones would return when Japan’s surrender in WWII cemented the Soviet Union’s full control over Sakhalin.

Soviet authorities repatriated thousands of Japanese nationals from Sakhalin. But they refused to send back the Koreans, who had become stateless after the war, apparently to meet labor shortages in the island’s coal mines and elsewhere.

Moscow’s attitude hardened further after Communist ally North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950; most of the Korean laborers in Sakhalin had come from the South.

South Korea and Russia established diplomatic relations in 1990 and about 4,000 Koreans have returned from Sakhalin since. But people like Shin who lost track of their relatives long before then have seen little progress.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but there are descendants from these Korean forced laborers that still live on Sakhalin Island that organizations sponsor to visit Korea.