Exiled Sakhalin Koreans Yearn to Go Home Again

During World War II, the Japanese who ruled Korea uprooted 43,000 Koreans and sent them to work in the coal mines of southern Sakhalin, the big island north of Japan. Although 40 years have passed, very few of them have ever made it back home.

After the war, southern Sakhalin was taken over by the Soviet Union, and Moscow has steadfastly refused to repatriate the Koreans.

The Koreans have not been forgotten, though. Their welfare and the fate of efforts to get them out are closely watched here by the Society of Korean Returnees From Sakhalin in Japan.

Over a Grocery Store

The society occupies a small room over a grocery store in a working-class district of Tokyo. It is not a large organization, for fewer than 500 of the Koreans forcibly sent to Sakhalin have been able to get out since the war ended.

Pak Ro Hak, 74, is head of the society. His store serves as a clearinghouse for letters, because South Korea and the Soviet Union have no diplomatic relations and thus no facilities for exchanging mail. The letters that pass through Pak’s hands tell of pain and longing that seem to be as acute today as on the day the men were torn from their homes and families.

Typical of these letters was a recent one from Chong Yong Ki, 74, a retired miner who last saw his family in 1942 in a village in what is now South Korea: “There has not been a single day or night in all these years that I have not thought of my wife and children,” the man wrote.

3 or 4 Letters a Day

Pak said he gets three or four letters from Sakhalin every day.

Kim Dong Yong, who lives in Kyongju, South Korea, relies on Pak to keep in touch with her husband on Sakhalin. She lived with him for just one month before he was taken away 44 years ago.

“All I hope for,” she said in a telephone interview, “is that we can see each other once again before we all die.”

More than 1,000 families in South Korea still wait to be reunited with fathers, husbands and brothers who were taken to Sakhalin. It is not clear exactly how many of the Koreans on Sakhalin still want to go home. For like Jews who wish to leave the Soviet Union, those who publicly declare their wishes must contend with official harassment.

Role of Other Countries

But unlike the Soviet Jews, who can count on Western governments for support, the Koreans on Sakhalin not only get no support, they are actively frustrated. No fewer than five countries, including the United States, have had a hand in preventing the Koreans from going home or even getting out briefly to see their families.

Their plight reflects the lot of both Sakhalin and Korea in recent history. Sakhalin, colonized by both Russia and Japan in the 18th and 19th centuries, was under joint Russo-Japanese control for a time in the mid-19th Century, then entirely under Russian control beginning in 1875. In 1905, after the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the Treaty of Portsmouth gave Japan the southern half of Sakhalin, while Russia retained the northern section.

Korea, meanwhile, was annexed by Japan in 1910, and the Koreans were harshly exploited to help build Japanese economic strength. Those sent to work in Sakhalin found themselves in Soviet territory with Japan’s defeat in World War II and the transfer of southern Sakhalin to the Soviet Union. At the same time, their Korean homeland became two hostile nations.

For the last decade, it has been Communist North Korea and the Soviet Union that have most vigorously opposed the departure of the Koreans. But before 1976, Japan refused to issue entry visas to any of the Koreans on Sakhalin. That year, the exit permits of 20 Sakhalin Koreans expired while they waited for visas for Japan. Of the 20, one eventually reached Japan and reported that another Korean who had been refused a visa had committed suicide while waiting.

Japanese Repatriated

Immediately after the war, the United States negotiated the repatriation of 300,000 Japanese from Sakhalin, but made no effort on behalf of the 43,000 Koreans. A U.S. Embassy spokesman said no one at the embassy could recall the circumstances, but Japanese lawyers working for Pak’s organization said it was Japanese officials, not Americans, who were reluctant to have the Koreans brought to Japan; the Americans did not push the issue.

Pak recalled that in the 1950s even South Korea abandoned the Sakhalin Koreans. He said President Syngman Rhee denounced them as having been “tainted by communism.”

Pak said that when the war ended, “we were thinking that we Koreans who had been liberated would be going home first,” but then “the Japanese got to go, and we ended up staying.”

In 1958, Pak was allowed to leave Sakhalin, along with 479 other Korean men, to settle in Japan with Japanese women they had married on Sakhalin.

Since then, only four Koreans have been able to obtain exit papers from Soviet authorities and entry visas from the Japanese. All four were 60 or older by the time they were allowed to leave. Three have since died, and the fourth, Chong Jong Du, who lives in a remote mountain village on the South Korean island of Cheju, is described by friends as very ill. According to Pak, Chong spent 25 years in exile in Siberia for refusing to work for the Soviets.

Written in Blood

Early last year, in an attempt to focus world attention on the problem, the son of a Sakhalin Korean appeared at a news conference in Tokyo, opened a vein in his arm with a knife and wrote in blood on a handkerchief, in Korean: “Let my people go.”

Lately, however, the mood among Pak and his Japanese supporters has moved from quiet despair to one of guarded optimism.

“There has been some progress in the past few months,” Pak told a visitor to his office. “For the first time, I received a response from the Soviet Red Cross. I sent a letter in January about a man on Sakhalin with relatives in Japan, and the reply came in November. It took them 10 months, but they did reply, and they had never done that before.”

Besides the letter from the Soviet Red Cross, the Soviet authorities last year issued short-term exit visas to eight Koreans, enabling them to meet in Japan with relatives from South Korea. Before that, the only Koreans who had been allowed out on short-term visas were a family of three from Khabarovsk in Siberia. No one from Sakhalin had been allowed to go to Japan in nearly a decade.

Difficult to Get In, Out

Sakhalin, which the Soviets have designated a sensitive border zone, is a difficult place for anyone to get in and out of, even Soviet nationals.

Pak withdrew a brown envelope from under his television set, one of dozens there, and took out of it a picture of an elderly Korean.

“This man,” he said, “moved to Khabarovsk from Sakhalin in order to have a better chance to make it to Japan.”

The reference was to Kim Song Kon, 66, a retired miner and one of the eight Koreans who received short-term exit visas in 1985. Last February, in the waiting room of a provincial Japanese airport where a Soviet plane arrives once a week from Khabarovsk, Kim met his daughter, Chong Ja, for the first time.

Chong Ja, 43, had flown over from South Korea for the reunion. In 1942, when Kim was sent to Sakhalin, his wife was pregnant. The reunion came too late for her; she died several years ago.

A Discouraging Letter

Not all the information that comes to the grocery store is encouraging. A month ago there was a letter from a member of the Soviet Politburo, Mikhail S. Solomentsev, in response to inquiries by a prominent Japanese intermediary. “Sakhalin Koreans wishing to leave,” Solomentsev said, “may do so in keeping with Soviet law. But as there are no applications to leave, there are no papers to process.”

Reading Solomentsev’s letter, delivered via the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo, Pak smiled wryly.

Last October, a Japanese journalist spent five days on Sakhalin, where he was introduced to a number of Koreans who told him they had no desire to leave. But when he slipped away from his hosts and asked Koreans on the street if they wanted to go home, one replied, “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to ask such questions?”

Early in January, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze was in Tokyo, the first Soviet foreign minister to visit Japan in a decade. He was asked about the Koreans on Sakhalin and, according to a Japanese official, replied that “there may be room for exceptions.”

‘Best News in Years’

Kenichi Takagi, one of four Japanese lawyers who are suing their government on behalf of Koreans on Sakhalin, called Shevardnadze’s statement “the best news in years.” The lawyers are trying to get the Japanese government to accept responsibility for the repatriation of the Koreans. After 10 years and 45 hearings, their case is still pending.

According to Takagi, the Shevardnadze statement could be the first step in reaching an understanding by the Japanese, Soviets and South Koreans to allow relatives in South Korea to travel to Sakhalin via Japan.

“This is the first time that the Soviets and the Japanese have agreed on anything related to the Sakhalin Koreans,” he said.

The reference to “exceptions,” he said, might mean that Japanese and Soviet officials could discuss the issue on a case-by-case basis without Moscow having to retreat from its position that only North Korea is qualified to represent the affairs of Koreans on Sakhalin.

Deported to North Korea

Since the postwar partition of Korea into Communist north and non-Communist south, most of the Koreans on Sakhalin have reportedly been forced to apply for either Soviet or North Korean citizenship, even though nearly all the Koreans there came from what is now South Korea. In 1976, according to Pak, a group of 18 Sakhalin Koreans were deported to North Korea after publicly demonstrating their desire to leave for Japan.

The Japanese government appears to be searching for a face-saving formula, one that would avoid questions of Japan’s wartime role in sending the Koreans to Sakhalin and then doing nothing to bring them back. Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe told reporters after Shevardnadze’s departure that he had raised the matter of the Koreans from a “humanitarian point of view.”

Japanese officials have been upset by the activities of Takagi and other lawyers, members of a group called the Forum on Japan’s Postwar Responsibilities Toward Asian Peoples. A Foreign Ministry official, who asked not to be identified by name, said, “What is to be gained by trying to establish the responsibility of the government in court?”

Beginning of Interest

But members of the forum say the Japanese government’s direct interest in the Sakhalin Koreans began only in 1976, the year they took up their case. In that year, Japanese officials agreed to work for the repatriation to Japan and South Korea of 411 Sakhalin Koreans.

According to Takagi, South Korea wants to promote informal ties with Communist nations, especially in connection with the 1988 Olympic Games, which are to be in Seoul, and thus South Korea could be counted on to welcome a chance to send some of its citizens to visit Sakhalin.

But “there have been times like this in the past,” Takagi recalled, and they have been followed by disappointment.

Hopes for Visas Dashed

Hopes for a Soviet-Japanese agreement on visas were dashed in 1976 after a Soviet pilot defected with his MIG-25 jet fighter and landed his plane at a Japanese airport. In 1983, a plan to let South Korean relatives travel to Sakhalin via Japan fell through after Soviet fighters shot down a Korean airliner near Sakhalin.

According to Yasuaki Onuma, another lawyer with the forum, the issue may simply fade away.

“In a few years,” he said, “there may be no problem.”

In 1966, there were 7,000 names on the list of Koreans wishing to leave Sakhalin. A decade later, the number had declined to 3,500.

“Sometimes,” Pak said, “letters from Sakhalin contain a cutting of a man’s nail, or a clump of hair. Friends of the dead send such things for burial in the family grave in Korea.”