Power Relations and Education of the Korean Minority in the Japanese Karafuto and Soviet/Russian Sakhalin

Abstract

This chapter is on the Korean diaspora community in the Japanese Karafuto and Soviet-Russian Sakhalin Island. Using historiography, it examines the vicissitudes of Korean ethnic minority people who were mostly from the Southern part of the Joseon kingdom. They were forced to stay in the Karafuto/Sakhalin Island, first as conscripts and then cheap labor for mining and fishery. They were subjects of two imperial powers but without a passport, hence, making their repatriation impossible. Under strict and pragmatic ethnic language policiesLanguage policies, they suffered periodic ban or closure of “Korean schools” and manipulation of the education curriculum. Thus, it is argued, the Koreans became victims of two imperial systems of difference (ruler-ruled) and exploitation without being allowed to return to their motherland during the Japanese colonial rule of KoreaKorea (1910–1945), as well as after the handover of the Southern territory to the Soviet Union as a result of Japanese defeat in the World War II and continued all the way to 1986 when they were allowed to be repatriated under the political slogans of Perestroika and Glasnost (reformation and openness) that the Soviet Union was preoccupied with.