DPRK Forum

Exiled Koreans Return After 60 Years - Reading the story, it is pretty heartbreaking, and this is something I never heard about until now:

Starting in the 1920s, some 150,000 Koreans were brought 1,000 miles from Gyeongsangbuk province in Korea to the southern half of Sakhalin, off Siberia’s coast, then controlled by the Japanese. The province was chosen possibly to prevent the Koreans living near Japan from inundating the Japanese mainland to work.

The Koreans were pressed into coal mining, logging and construction. They worked in harsh conditions, amid the forests and mountains where brown bears roam and rivers teem with salmon.

After Japan lost World War II, the Soviet Union took over all of Sakhalin, including about 23,500 remaining Korean residents. Some of the Koreans had died in the war or from hard labor, while others had left.

Those still here were effectively stranded, since the Soviets had no diplomatic relations with what became South Korea, the U.S.-aligned country that was now home to their old province.

Sakhalin during the Soviet era was a “closed” border area, meaning outsiders needed special permission to enter. One of its many military bases housed the warplanes that in 1983 shot down Korean Air flight 007 for straying into Soviet airspace, killing all 269 people aboard.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviets allowed communist North Korea to lure away several hundred of the Korean youth. Some of the brightest are believed to have gone, in the false hope they could get back to South Korea.

Sakhalin Koreans got a glimpse of their former homeland on television during the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Its broad highways and high-rise buildings amazed a people who had left the poor, agrarian peninsula, said Chi Bok I, an announcer for Sakhalin’s Korean-language TV station who returned to Korea in October.

Over time, many Sakhalin Koreans took Russian names — Pak called herself Masha — and tried to integrate into Soviet society. But they faced discrimination, with Moscow shuttering Korean-language schools in the 1960s. Only after the Soviet reforms known as perestroika in the 1980s were the Koreans allowed again to start learning their own language.

Today, some 30,000 Koreans live on Sakhalin, a harpoon-shaped island with an area roughly three-quarters that of South Korea but a population of only about 547,000. The Koreans include the descendants of the original group and some who came later from parts of the former Soviet Union and North Korea.

The Korean cultural presence is strong in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the island’s capital city of more than 170,000 people, nestled in a valley backed by mountains. Markets feature kimchi — Korean pickled cabbage _and restaurants serve Korean cuisine.

About 2,000 of the estimated 3,000 elderly who qualify for repatriation are choosing to go home, according to the South Korean Foreign Ministry.

Since I did not know much about this area, I wen to Google to look it up, and reading it leads me to understand the hostility towards Japan. DPRK Studies has an article about the controversy surrounding the comfort women described in this overview of Sakhalin Korean Documentary (which I would like to see by the way):

A dark shadow cast by Japan and its responsibility for the continuing predicament of the Koreans of Sakhalin looms over the film. The overwhelming anger towards the former colonizer felt by the interviewees some fifty years after liberation is more than palpable, and the narration itself appears to endorse the view that blame for the ongoing sadness of these people lies with the Japanese. Although Japan’s forcible conscription of “comfort women” has begun to command international attention, the plight of the Sakhalin Koreans continues to go largely unnoticed, and the documentary can be seen as advocating that the Japanese should offer compensation for their wartime misdeeds.

Wikipedia Entry on this topic

I plan to research this more, and anybody that has further information, I would be grateful.