Green and circled: Karafuto within Japan in 1942 Light green: Other constituents of the Empire of Japan (i.e. internationally recognised as Japanese territory before the Pacific War)
In August 1945, the Japanese administration ceased to function following the Soviet invasion of South Sakhalin. The Soviet Union annexed Karafuto Prefecture, although it continued to exist under Japanese law until Japan formally abolished it in June 1949.
Name
The Japanese name Karafuto purportedly comes from the Ainukamuy kar put ya mosir (カムィ・カㇻ・プッ・ヤ・モシㇼ), which means 'the island a god has created on the estuary [of the Amur River]'. It was formerly known as Kita Ezo, meaning Northern Ezo (Ezo was the former name for Hokkaido). When Japan governed the southern part of the island, they referred to it as Minami Karafuto (南樺太, South Karafuto) or simply Karafuto (樺太). The northern part of the island was called Kita Karafuto (北樺太, North Karafuto) or simply Sagaren (薩哈嗹).
In Russian, the entire island was named Sakhalin or Saghalien. It is from Manchusahaliyan ula angga hada, meaning "peak of the mouth of Amur River". The southern part was simply called Yuzhny Sakhalin ("South Sakhalin"). In Korean, the name was Sahallin or Hwataedo, with the latter name in use during Japanese rule in Korea.
History
Map of Sakhalin with parallels showing the division at the 50th parallel north with the Karafuto Prefecture highlighted in redThe Karafuto Prefectural Office in Toyohara
Japanese settlement on Sakhalin dates back to at least the Edo period. Ōtomari was established in 1679, and cartographers of the Matsumae domain mapped the island and named it "Kita Ezo". Japanese cartographer and explorer Mamiya Rinzō established that Sakhalin was an island through his discovery of Mamiya Strait (now the Strait of Tartary) in 1809. Japan unilaterally proclaimed sovereignty over the whole island in 1845.
The 1855 Treaty of Shimoda acknowledged that both the Russian Empire and Japan had joint rights of occupation to Sakhalin, without setting a definite territorial demarcation. As the island became settled in the 1860s and 1870s, this ambiguity led to increasing friction between settlers. Attempts by the Tokugawa shogunate to purchase the entire island from the Russian Empire failed, and the new Meiji government was unable to negotiate a partition of the island into separate territories. In the Treaty of Saint Petersburg (1875), Japan agreed to give up its claims on Sakhalin in exchange for undisputed ownership of the Kuril Islands.
Japan invaded Sakhalin in the final stages of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, but per the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth was allowed to retain only the southern portion of the island below the 50° N parallel. Russia retained the northern portion, but Japan was awarded favorable commercial rights that included fishing and mineral extraction rights in the north. In 1907, Karafuto Prefecture was officially established, with the capital at Ōtomari. In 1908, the capital was relocated to Toyohara.
A Japanese soldier at the border between the Karafuto Prefecture and Soviet Sakhalin
In August 1945, after repudiating the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April, and according to the signed agreements of Yalta, in which Stalin pledged that the Soviet Union would enter the Pacific War three months after the defeat of Germany, the Soviet Union invaded Karafuto. The Soviet attack started on 11 August 1945, three days before the surrender of Japan. The Soviet 56th Rifle Corps, part of the 16th Army, consisting of the 79th Rifle Division, the 2nd Rifle Brigade, the 5th Rifle Brigade and the 214 Armored Brigade, attacked the Japanese 88th Infantry Division. Although the Soviet Red Army outnumbered the Japanese by three to one, they advanced only slowly due to strong Japanese resistance. It was not until the 113th Rifle Brigade and the 365th Independent Naval Infantry Rifle Battalion from Sovetskaya Gavan landed in Tōro, a seashore village in western Karafuto, on 16 August that the Soviets broke the Japanese defense line. Japanese resistance grew weaker after this landing. Actual fighting continued until 21 August. Between 22 and 23 August, most remaining Japanese units agreed to a ceasefire. The Soviets completed the conquest of Karafuto on 25 August 1945, by occupying the capital of Toyohara.
By the end of hostilities, 80,000 residents had already fled Karafuto and civilian casualties numbered from 3,500 to 3,700. This left the prefecture with a population of about 300,000. From the end of the war to 1946, the remaining population would live and work alongside incoming Soviet settlers. Karafuto's municipal and industrial leaders retained their positions and would stay on as deputies after being replaced by Soviet equivalents. Marxism-Leninism was added to school curricula and Shintoism was removed, though temples and religious gatherings were still permitted. Following an agreement between the United States and the USSR on December 19, 1946, repatriation of the Japanese population began.
At the conclusion of the repatriation program in July 1949, there were 279,356 people who had arrived from Karafuto to Japan, with 35% claiming no familial connection to the Japanese home islands. Repatriates had their property confiscated as colonial holdings, as was done in Korea and Taiwan. But the Overseas Compatriots Relief Committee[jp] refused to provide aid on account of Karafuto’s 1943 reclassification from outer to inner land.
The majority of repatriates resettled in Hokkaido. At least 17,600 were sent to prefectures in the Tohoku region and 296 homeless repatriates were sent to Tottori. A Japanese population of 332 would remain in Sakhalin after 1949. Following the Soviet–Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956, most of this small population would be repatriated as well.
Repatriation being limited to Japanese residents and the subsequent Korean War prevented the repatriation of Karafuto’s Korean population. Resulting in a population of Sakhalin Koreans persisting into the present day.
The Japanese government formally abolished Karafuto Prefecture as a legal entity on 1 June 1949. With the Treaty of San Francisco, Japan renounced its rights to Sakhalin, despite not formally acknowledging Soviet sovereignty over it, nor the Kuril Islands. Both territories currently compromise the Russian Federation's Sakhalin Oblast. The Japan-Sakhalin Association currently exists to maintain ties between former Japanese residents of Sakhalin and its current inhabitants.
The pre-war economy of Karafuto was based on fishing, forestry and agriculture, together with extraction of coal and petroleum. In terms of industry, the paper industry and the charcoal production industry was well developed. Pulp for rayon production in Honshu was predominately sourced from Karafuto. The territory suffered from a labor shortage through most of its history, and migrant laborers from the Japanese mainland were frequently recruited for seasonal work on in Karafuto. In 1924, 57% of laborers in the construction and forestry industry came from Tohoku and 22% from the Hokuriku region. These laborers would reside in worker dormitories[jp] near their sites before returning to their home provinces upon completion of the project. Forced labor known as Takobeya Labor would be used throughout Karafuto's history as well. Indigenous Nivkh and Oroks worked in Japanese-run fisheries and a synthetic textile plant near the Russian border. For the construction of the Toyohara-Maoka line, bonded labor was put to use, including Chinese contract laborers. By the end of the 1920s, these laborers would be replaced with Koreans. With the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, their population would increase substantially.
On November 17 1906, a 42.5-kilometre-long (26.4mi) railway connecting Tohoyara and Otomari was completed. In 1910, this railway would be converted from 600mm (1ft11+5⁄8in) to 1,067mm (3ft6in), standardizing it with the rest of Japan's railways. Over the following decades an extensive railway network was constructed in Karafuto to transport freight and passengers across the prefecture. The Karafuto Railway Bureau (樺太鐵道局, Karafuto Tetsudōkyoku) maintained 682.6 kilometers of track in four main lines and an additional 58.2 kilometers of track. After 1945, this network would serve as the foundation of the Sakhalin Railway.
Government
Karafuto was administered from the central government in Tokyo as the Karafuto Agency (樺太廳, Karafuto-chō) under the Colonization Bureau (拓務局, Takumukyoku) of the Home Ministry. The Colonization Bureau became the
Ministry of Colonial Affairs (拓務省, Takumushō) in 1923 at which time Karafuto was officially designated an overseas territory of the Empire of Japan.
When the Ministry of Colonial Affairs was absorbed into the new Ministry of Greater East Asia in 1942, the administration of Karafuto was separated, and Karafuto became an integral part of the Japanese archipelago.
Karafuto Prefecture with 4 subprefectures, namely Toyohara, Maoka, Esutoru and Shikuka. Toyohara City was also a part of Toyohara Subprefecture.
As of 1945, Karafuto was divided into four subprefectures, which in turn were subdivided into 11 districts, in turn divided into 41 municipalities (one city, 13 towns, and 27 villages).
Karafuto's largest city was Toyohara, while other major cities included Esutoru in the north central and Maoka in the south central region.
The list below are the towns and the city of the prefecture. These in italics are the corresponding current Russian names.
↑舊露西亞 refers to the Russian Empire (1721–1917) and the Russian people who remained living in Southern Sakhalin after it became Japanese territory, as well as the White émigrés who came as a result of the Russian Civil War.
↑Krebs, Gerhard (1997). "31. Japan and the German-Soviet War". In Wegner, Bernd (ed.). From peace to war: Germany, Soviet Russia, and the world, 1939–1941. Berghahn Books. p.551. ISBN1-57181-882-0.
12Urbansky, Sören; Barop, Helena (2017). "Under the Red Star's Faint Light: How Sakhalin Became Soviet". Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 18 (2): 283–316. doi:10.1353/kri.2017.0019.
12Bull, Jonathan (October 2018). "Karafuto Repatriates and the Work of the Hakodate Regional Repatriation Centre, 1945–50". Journal of Contemporary History. 53 (4): 788–810. doi:10.1177/0022009418761213.
↑Suzuki, Shinichi (January 1935). "The Rayon Industry in Japan". Economic Geography. 11 (1): 107. doi:10.2307/140653. JSTOR140653.
↑Steven Ivings: Recruitment and coercion in Japan’s far north: Evidence from colonial Karafuto’s forestry and construction industries, 1910–37, in: Labor History, Vol. 57 (2016), No. 2, pp. 215–234.
↑Morris-Suzuki, Tessa (August 2001). "Northern Lights: The Making and Unmaking of Karafuto Identity". The Journal of Asian Studies. 60 (3): 645–671. doi:10.2307/2700105. JSTOR2700105.
↑西鶴定嘉 (25 December 1977). 樺太の歴史 (第二刷ed.). 東京都: 国書刊行会. pp.377–378.
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Sakhalin Oblast
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