vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #157 / Social life / Reading article...

Koreans stranded on Sakhalin Island after World War II have started compensation claims against the Japanese government. They long to return to their homeland.

Kim Yul Pi, one of 45,000 Koreans abandoned on Sakhalin Island after World War II, recently returned home for the first time in half a century.

Kim was taken from the rice fields when a Japanese soldier burst into his home and forced his father to provide an able body for the war effort. And the Japanese shipped Kim to Sakhalin to work in a coal mine.

"We thought we would be allowed home when the war ended," said Kim, now 76. "But instead, the Russians took control of the island and became our new masters. We were not even allowed to send letters to our relatives."

Eighty other Sakhalin Koreans returned this year to the villages they were torn from as teenagers. Publicity from the trip, Korean elders hope, will set the ball rolling for compensation claims against the Japanese government.

The occupying Japanese army conscripted the Koreans, almost all from what is now South Korea, in 1944 to work as slave laborers on the Japanese-controlled southern part of the island. When Russian troops took control of southern Sakhalin at the end of the war, the Koreans were forced to stay and develop the area.

Many had children and wives or husbands in Korea. But forgotten by the world, the Sakhalin Koreans had no choice but to make new lives on this bleak and desolate island. Many remarried.

Sakhalin’s Korean population today is 43,000, of whom 7,000 are first-generation. Every night programs in Korean, broadcast from North Korea, play on the local television station. There are several Korean evangelical churches as well a Korean-language radio service and newspaper.

But since 1990, when Moscow re-established relations with Seoul, many Sakhalin Koreans have started to consider returning home. Already 297 have been repatriated with the assistance of the Red Cross, but more wish to go. A recent survey showed that 80 percent of the first generation Koreans wanted to be repatriated if they had the money to return home.

"Who doesn’t want his homeland?" said Re Tom Dim of the Sakhalin Koreans’ Senior Citizens Association. "We all want to live in our homeland. ... I want to die there."

Yet the second- and third-generation Koreans have no such desire. Korean music, films, food, and Tae Kwon Do are popular among young Sakhalin Koreans, and many have become rich importing food from South Korea with the help of family connections. But few speak fluent Korean and most regard themselves as Russian.

"My homeland is Russia," said Kim Jen, a student. "I was born here, and this is where my friends and relatives are. I want to visit Korea, but not for a long time."

But for those who do want to return, the major obstacle is money. The Russian government want Japan to contribute to repatriation costs.

The Japanese say only Japanese citizens brought to Sakhalin are entitled to compensation, although the country has quietly given money to the Red Cross to fund short trips home for Sakhalin Koreans. The government has also promised to build an old folks’ home and apartments in South Korea for 600 returnees.

Koreans on Sakhalin say this isn’t enough. The Separated Korean Families Association on the island is demanding a compensation of more than $100,000 per first-generation Korean, and the group wants children compensated as well. The Sakhalin Koreans’ recent discovery that other groups are seeking reparations for Japan’s wartime atrocities has only encouraged their campaign.

"So far, there has been no response," said Mr. Kim Men Yell, the association’s president. "But we are hoping to bring the case of the Sakhalin Koreans to the world’s attention. People know about the Japanese treatment of Korean ‘comfort women’ [women forced into prostitution for the Japanese army] and the POWs, but who knows about our half century of enforced exile. We have been forgotten."