The Marmot’s Hole

Over at Far Outliers — a blog highly favored by Korea-blog troll extraordinaire Lux Bearer — there is an outstanding post on the Korean community of the Russian Far Eastern island of Sakhalin. One of my classmates over at Kyung Hee University was a Sakhalin Korean who told me that the South Korean government was apparently providing housing for elderly returnees from Sakhalin in, if memory serves me correctly, Ansan. Anyway, read Joel’s post - it’s a good one. Just a snippet:

For half a century, the Koreans of Sakhalin - now numbering 40,000 - were a stateless people, inhabiting this desolate island against their will. At the height of World War II, imperial Japan brought them from Korea, then a Japanese colony, to work as slave laborers in coal mines. When Japan lost the war, the Soviet Union expelled the Japanese, but Stalin still needed coal miners. With few Russians living on what was once a czarist penal colony, he refused to release the Koreans.

I’ve heard stories about Sakhalin being a pretty desolate place, although my classmate did say it was a remarkably beautiful island, even if the winters were a bit rough.