24 Facts About Sakhalin Koreans

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.

The issue of self-identification is complicated by the fact that many Sakhalin Koreans feel that Koreans from Central Asia look down on them.

Korean immigration to Sakhalin Koreans began as early as the 1910s when the Mitsui Group began recruiting labourers from the peninsula for their mining operations.

Origins of Sakhalin Koreans are traced to the Japanese-controlled southern half of the island.

In Mizuho Village, Japanese fleeing Soviet troops who had landed at Maoka claimed that the Sakhalin Koreans were cooperating with the Red Army and that they were pillaging Japanese property.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Sakhalin government's policy towards the Sakhalin Koreans continued to shift in line with bilateral relations between North Korea and the Soviet Union.

Television and radio programmes from both North and South Korea, as well as local programming, began to be broadcast on Sakhalin Koreans Korean Broadcasting, the only Korean television station in all of Russia.

Sakhalin Koreans have provided assistance to refugees fleeing North Korea, either those who illegally escaped across the border, or those who escaped North Korean labour camps in Russia itself.

Conversely, some foreign students from Korea studying in Sakhalin reported difficulties in befriending local Koreans, claiming that the latter looked down on them for being foreigners.

However, Sakhalin Koreans who have travelled to the mainland of Russia, or have relocated to there, report that they have encountered various forms of racism.

Unlike ethnic Russians or other local minority groups, Sakhalin Koreans are exempted from conscription, but there have been calls for this exemption to be terminated.

However, with the increasing exposure to South Korean pop culture, some younger Sakhalin 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 Koreans is not very closely related to Hamgyong dialect or Koryo-mar, but is instead descended from Jeolla and Gyeongsang dialects.

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.

Korean churches 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 Koreans successfully pressured Korean Presbyterian missionaries to cancel a conference of more than 100 Presbyterian and other Protestant missionaries from around the former Soviet Union.

Ethnic Koreans are numerous among the church-goers of St James Cathedral, seat of the Apostolic Prefecture of Yuzhno Sakhalinsk, in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.

Sakhalin Koreans reported listening to Western popular and classical music at much lower rates than Koreans in the rest of the former Soviet Union.