Voices From The Shifting Russo Japanese Border

In the nineteenth century, as the Russian empire expanded eastwards and the Japanese empire expanded onto the Asian continent, the Russo-Japanese border became contested on and around the island of Sakhalin, its Russian name, or Karafuto, as it is known in Japanese. Then in the wake of the Second World War, Russia seized control of the island and the Japanese inhabitants were deported. Sakhalin’s history as a border zone makes it a lynchpin of Russo-Japanese relations, and as such it is a rich case study for exploring the key themes of this book: life in the borderlands, migration, repatriation, historical memory, multiculturalism and identity. With a focus on cross-border dialogue, Voices from the Shifting Russo-Japanese Border reveals the lives of the ordinary people in the border regions between Russia and Japan, and how they and their communities have been affected by shifts in the Russo-Japanese border over the past century-and-a-half. Examining the lives and experiences of repatriates from Karafuto/Sakhalin in contemporary Hokkaido and their contribution to the multicultural society of Japan’s northernmost island, the chapters cover the border shifts in Karafuto/Sakhalin up until 1945, the immediate aftermath the Second World War, the commemorative practices and memories of those in both Japan and Eastern Russia, and, finally, postwar lives by drawing extensively on interviews with people in the communities affected most by the shifting border. This interdisciplinary book will be of huge interest to students and scholars across a broad range of subjects including Russo-Japanese relations, Northeast Asian history, border studies, migration studies, and the Second World War.

In the nineteenth century, as the Russian empire expanded eastwards and the Japanese empire expanded onto the Asian continent, the Russo-Japanese border became contested on and around the island of Sakhalin, its Russian name, or Karafuto, as it is known in Japanese. Then in the wake of the Second World War, Russia seized control of the island and the Japanese inhabitants were deported. Sakhalin’s history as a border zone makes it a lynchpin of Russo-Japanese relations, and as such it is a rich case study for exploring the key themes of this book: life in the borderlands, migration, repatriation, historical memory, multiculturalism and identity. With a focus on cross-border dialogue, Voices from the Shifting Russo-Japanese Border reveals the lives of the ordinary people in the border regions between Russia and Japan, and how they and their communities have been affected by shifts in the Russo-Japanese border over the past century-and-a-half. Examining the lives and experiences of repatriates from Karafuto/Sakhalin in contemporary Hokkaido and their contribution to the multicultural society of Japan’s northernmost island, the chapters cover the border shifts in Karafuto/Sakhalin up until 1945, the immediate aftermath the Second World War, the commemorative practices and memories of those in both Japan and Eastern Russia, and, finally, postwar lives by drawing extensively on interviews with people in the communities affected most by the shifting border. This interdisciplinary book will be of huge interest to students and scholars across a broad range of subjects including Russo-Japanese relations, Northeast Asian history, border studies, migration studies, and the Second World War.

This book explores the issues of education, the use of languages and the formation of self-identification of the Japanese and Korean diasporas of Sakhalin, over a hundred years period: from the time they moved to the island, until their “return” to historical homelands in Japan or South Korea. During this time, their language environment and language of education changed 4 times and Japanese and Korean of Sakhalin continued to be a linguistic and ethnic minority. This book is of interest to researchers, students, NGO supporters and education policy makers.

The territorial dispute between Japan and Russia over four islands off the northeast coast of Hokkaidō has been an enduring obstacle to closer relations between the two powers and therefore an important determinant of geopolitics in North-East Asia. Having emerged at the end of World War II, this conflict has now existed for more than seven decades. And yet, despite the passage of so much time, within Japan there remains a resilience of belief that the islands will eventually be returned. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of Japan’s prospects of ever recovering these "Northern Territories". Offering an in-depth account of why the Japanese side believe they still have a chance of securing the return of the four islands, it also provides an objective and methodical evaluation of the prospects of these expectations being realised. The key finding is that Japanese policymakers and scholars have consistently overestimated the extent of Japan’s leverage with regard to Russia, and that there is, in fact, already no possibility whatsoever of sovereignty over the four islands being restored to Japan. This has major implications for Japanese decision makers who must balance their principled commitment not to compromise on territorial issues with more pragmatic considerations of energy security and how to contain the rise of Chinese regional power. Presenting a unique analysis and a strikingly different perspective on this territorial dispute, the findings of this book are of considerable importance for international relations within the Asia-Pacific region. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Japanese Politics, Russian Politics and International Relations.

Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, barely features in most histories of the Second World War. However, the combination of distinctive war experiences, a vibrant set of local historian groups, and powerful media organizations disseminating local war history, has generated an identifiable set of local collective memories. Hokkaidoʼs status as an early colonial acquisition also makes the island an important vantage point from which to reassess the course and nature of the Japanese Empire. This book argues that Hokkaido’s experiences of war and its militarized post-war constitutes a local case study with a much greater national and international significance on both theoretical and empirical grounds than first impressions might suggest. Using Japanese-language sources presented for the first time in English and a number of detailed local history case studies, it offers a fascinating and hitherto little-known perspective on the Second World War. It also combines a comprehensive theory of how war memories operate at the local level within a broad historical context that explains Hokkaidoʼs pivotal role within Japanese imperial history. Demonstrating that understanding local history and memories is essential for a nuanced understanding of national history and memories, the book will be highly valuable to students and scholars of Japanese history, Second World War history, and Asian history.

Contrary to the image of Korea as a largely self-contained country until its economy became global during the 1990s, this book shows that transnationalism has firmly been part of modern Korea’s national experience throughout its existence. The volume portrays Korea’s frequent transnational entanglements with other nations in East Asia and the West from the start of its annexation into the Empire of Japan in 1910 to the present day. It explores how modern Korea negotiated its complicated colonial relations with imperial Japan and its political and economic relations with the West in meeting the challenges of the globalized world. Early chapters cover the origins of Korea’s democratic republicanism among Korean immigrants in the United States, the Royal-Dutch oil industry in Korea, military hygiene and sex workers, and prisons in the Japanese empire. From the latter half of the twentieth century to the present, the book probes Cold War politics between Korea and Europe, transnational Korean communities in China, Japan, the Russian Far East, and the West, and ethnic Korean returnees from the Russian Far East. With contributions from leading international scholars, this collection’s attention to modern Korean history, economy, gender studies, and migration is ideal for upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates.

Over the last 70 years, Japanese Studies scholarship has gone through several dominant paradigms, from ‘demystifying the Japanese’, to analysis of Japanese economic strength, to discussion of global interest in Japanese popular culture. This book assesses this literature, considering future directions for research into the 2020s and beyond. Shifting the geographical emphasis of Japanese Studies away from the West to the Asia-Pacific region, this book identifies topic areas in which research focusing on Japan will play an important role in global debates in the coming years. This includes the evolution of area studies, coping with aging populations, the various patterns of migration and environmental breakdown. With chapters from an international team of contributors, including significant representation from the Asia-Pacific region, this book enacts Yoshio Sugimoto’s notion of ‘cosmopolitan methodology’ to discuss Japan in an interdisciplinary and transnational context and provides overviews of how Japanese Studies is evolving in other Asian countries such as China and Indonesia. New Frontiers in Japanese Studies is a thought-provoking volume and will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese and Asian Studies. The Introduction and Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.