Sakhalin After the end of the
Russo-Japanese War in 1905 with the
Treaty of Portsmouth, the southern half of
Sakhalin officially became Japanese territory, and was renamed as
Karafuto, prompting an influx of Japanese settlers there. Japanese settled in the northern half of Karafuto; after Japan agreed to hand this half back to the Soviet Union, some may have chosen to remain north of the Soviet line of control. Furthermore, roughly 40,000 Korean settlers, despite still holding Japanese nationality, were denied permission by the Soviet Government to transit through Japan to repatriate to their homes in the southern half of the
Korean peninsula. They were either told to take North Korean citizenship or take Soviet citizenship. Known as
Sakhalin Koreans, they were trapped on the island for almost four decades.
Prisoners of war Following
Japan's surrender, 575,000 Japanese prisoners of war captured by the
Red Army in
Manchuria,
Karafuto, and
Korea were sent to
camps in
Siberia and the rest of the Soviet Union. According to figures of the
Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, 473,000 were repatriated to Japan after the normalisation of
Japanese-Soviet relations; 55,000 died in Russia, and another 47,000 remained missing; a Russian report released in 2005 listed the names of 27,000 who had been
sent to North Korea to perform forced labour there. Rank was no guarantee of repatriation; one
Armenian interviewed by the
US Air Force in 1954 claims to have met a Japanese general while living in a camp at Chunoyar,
Krasnoyarsk Krai between May 1951 and June 1953. Some continue to return home as late as 2006. ==Post-normalisation==