99% Invisible - 497- Hometown Village

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

Sakhalin is a long, skinny island east of Russia's mainland. Russia and Japan have long fought over the territory, which has left the ethnic Koreans who came to work on the island starting in the early 1900s in a kind of limbo. Tatyana Kim, a native of Sakhalin, guides us through its unusual history and the difficulties of a repatriation that is long overdue.Hometown Village 

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the summer of 2002, Tatiana Kim took her first trip abroad. She was going to Anson, South Korea, which is a city that's about a half an hour drive outside of Seoul. I was visiting Anson to spend the summer break with my grandparents. They had recently moved into a very special apartment complex. That's Tatiana, by the way. Even though on the surface it seemed like any other building, there were these little details that stuck out to me.

The holes and elevators were a little wider and had handrails all the way across for people to hold onto. And for some reason, there was also a red cross office right on the premises. But the most distinctive feature about this complex was the people who lived there. There were about a thousand residents who were all elderly, and even though everybody was of Korean descent, they all spoke Russian. Sometimes, I'd meet other teenagers who were visiting their grandparents, but just like me, none of them spoke any Korean on the Russian. In the kitchens, our grandmothers would cook us both,

panchang and borsh. And that's because every person in this complex came here from the same place, an island off the coast of Russia called Sakelin. In Russian, the complex is called Sakhlin Village. But in Korean, this settlement has a different name, Gohang Maid, meaning hometown village. Gohang Maid was constructed specifically as a settlement for people like my grandparents. ethnic Koreans who had returned to the country after being trapped for decades on Saeho-lin. Separated from their homeland and abandoned in the midst of huge geopolitical events, tens

of thousands of Koreans spent nearly 50 years stranded behind the iron curtain, waiting for a chance to return home. I grew up on Sauceline. It's a long skinny island of the Russian coast just north of Japan. In fact, it's so close to Japan that when you stand on the southern tip of the island, you can actually pick up a Japanese cell signal. Winters can get very cold and snowy there. Even in the summer months, the average temperature doesn't usually

get above 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Apparently, Socklin used to be the home of Azaris penal colony and Anton Chekhov once described it as hell. I swear, he was wrong though. It's a beautiful place to live. I'll take your word over Chekhov's. When I started traveling to other countries, the first question people usually ask is where you from. When I answer from Russia, I get puzzled looks. You don't look Russian, they usually say, but there are a lot of Koreans in Saoho-Lin, and we've been there for a long time. Throughout its history, control of Saoho Sucland has passed back and forth between

two powerful empires, Russia and Japan. Around the turn of the 20th century, Russian Japan was fighting a war of a territory in East Asia, and by 1905 Russia had lost. So not only lost, but completely decimated. This is J. Hyeong Park, assistant professor at the Education University of Hong Kong. He says that under the terms of Russia's laws, Korea came under Japanese control. And Russia was forced to give up some of its territory, which included the southern half of Sao Han-lin. After the war, Sao Han-lin was split at the 50th parallel, and given to Japan. At a time, people used to cook a country by parallel, like a cake.

Although the environment was fridged, Soklin was valuable, because it was rich with natural resources like coal, timber, and fish. But Japan needed to bring in cheap labor to extract those resources. Which is how Koreans ended up on Saan-Hlan. At this point, the economy of Korea was severely weakened, and there were hardly any jobs left in the country. There was, however, plenty of work for those who were willing to travel north

to the Japanese controlled half of Saan-Hlan and brave the harsh conditions of the island. When Japan entered World War II, the government needed their own materials to fuel their military. And with Japanese men drafted into combat, more and more Koreans were forced to work in the timber yards and coal mines on the island as conscripted workers. 그가 모집자들이 마이거였어요. 이는 제 마이그란 마이터의 마이터가 born even seen as real people. So even if they died, they wouldn't be properly buried. She's saying this was the place as where workers were sent to, and a lot of people died.

So Korean migrants ended up on a remote island working in harsh conditions on behalf of the Japanese Empire. That is, until August 15, 1945. It was a huge occasion marked all over the world. And in Korea, the end of the Second World War was celebrated as Liberation Day. The movement went 35 years of Japanese colonial rule, finally came to an end. 23 million Koreans achieved the freedom from Japanese oppression against which they had never ceased to fight. Towards the end of the war, Soviet forces invaded the southern half of Soklin, and as part of the Japanese surrender, the entire island became the territory of the USSR.

This meant that all the Japanese and Korean people who were living there needed to return to their home countries because they were now on foreign soil. In Soklin alone, there were 400,000 Japanese citizens who needed to be repatriated. And because many currents were brought to Soklin by the Japanese government, they expected to return with them, many waited at the port alongside the Japanese nationals as the boards began arriving in Soklin to take people home. And then Japanese were taken to Japan, but not Koreans. This is Chang-Ju's song, Senior Lecturer in Korean and Asian Studies at the University of

Auckland. He says that Koreans on Saan-Holun were left behind. That's because when Japan surrendered, it was forced to give up many of its colonies, including Korea. Legally, until then, Koreans were Japanese citizens, because Korea was a direct part of a Japanese empire. This complicated the status of Koreans on the island, because they weren't Japanese citizens anymore. But they also didn't have a functional Korean government yet

to help them get back home. So an estimated 23,500 Koreans were trapped on Sao Han and had no way of returning. So all these Koreans, no one claimed and no one paid attention, they were all desperate. South Korea was closely affiliated with the capitalist US, while the North stayed aligned with the communist Soviet Union. The USSR actually did allow for the repatriation of Sakhling Koreans, but only to their ally nation, North Korea. And there was one enormous problem with that. These conscript workers were mostly from southern province, Busan and Jol-ah province, so they are being repatriated to the North- the North Korea, which is not their home land actually. And the truth is, the Soviet Union had no reason to help

Sahel and Koreans return to their home country. With hundreds of thousands of Japanese workers now gone, the USSR was reliant on Korean labor to continue developing the island. Soviet Union always need people to develop, to maintain certain level of your production of foods, fishery, and mining, a building railway and so on. Someone had to be there to work in the mines, cut the timber and fish for food. Why allow Koreans to live when they were a valuable workforce? The first generation of Koreans on Soklin had a difficult time adjusting to life

under the USSR. They didn't speak the Russian language and many had never even seen Westerners before. A new reality under the Soviet Union was absolutely foreign to them. What made things harder was that most people had come to the island as temporary workers. So parents, siblings, and sometimes spouses and children will have to in Korea. This is my grandmother again. She's saying that my grandfather was one of those people who had to live everything behind when he came to Saagalan.

She says my grandfather didn't want to go to Saagalan, but he was conscripted to work for a couple of years. He had left behind a sweetheart who was waiting for him back in Korea. But by the time they were ended, there was no way to return home. They lost all the hope and they were in despair because they suddenly realized they cannot go home. They lost any motivation to work. They said we drank and we sang. They can not go home. They lost any motivation to work. They said we drank, and we sang.

And the songs they were singing, and that, you know, I want to go my homeland and that kind of, you know, they were really desperate for a while. This song, Come Back to Busan Port, was really popular among Saehlin Koreans. It's about missing loved ones who have been separated from Korea. By the 1950s, it was clear that this problem of repatriation was not going to be solved anytime soon.

The Korean War and the Cold War both made it impossible to negotiate a diplomatic return. The South Korean government was busy rebuilding its country, and the Soviet government needed the labor. So, the USSR started allowing Soklin Koreans to apply for Soviet citizenship. But many people outright refused. In their eyes, citizenship meant commitment to the Soviet Union. This is Yuletzin, senior researcher of the Sakhalin Regional Museum, speaking to me in Russian.

She says that in the eyes of these Koreans adopting Soviet citizenship meant that you were given up on the dream of one day returning home. Well, the question is, for my family, it means because my mother, my uncle, is also a Sahel in Korean. And she says, to this day, your mother and aunt are not Russian citizens. They don't have a passport, just a resident's permit for stateless citizens. This created a lot of challenges for people. Every time they wanted to leave their town for any reason, they had to ask permission

from the local police station. Things like visiting family or going to funeral in a different part of Saqlun were more difficult. Udsa says that stateless citizens had problems everywhere that others don't have. The reality of the situation was that returning home was impossible. The Soviet Union was not going to allow them to leave, and Korea and Japan were not coming to rescue them. So if politics could not change, Sakhling Koreans would have to. They needed to adapt if they wanted to build a better future for themselves and for the next generation.

They learned Russian and send their children to Soviet schools. Koreans integrated more, and in the process Korean culture on Sahel and started becoming its own unique identity. You can tell that Sahel and Korean culture, even first generation culture by then, it was a mixture of Korean culture, Japanese culture, and Russian culture layer in their language life, in their food. You can even see this blending of culture in the way my grandmother communicates. She's saying that when she speaks, sometimes Japanese comes out, sometimes Russian or Korean.

Growing up, I saw this hybrid culture all around me. For the new year's celebration, we would make Russian dumplings with kimchi mixed in it. And every year when we honored our ancestors who passed away, our sobering would have incense and a bottle of Russian vodka on it. As far back as I can remember, being ethnically Korean in Russia was something to be proud of. Since the end of World War II, there was essentially no communication between the USSR and South Korea. There were no phone calls and no mail service between separated family members,

so many people weren't sure if their loved ones were even still alive. Most people behind the Iron Curtain could only rely on their memories of the poor and rural country they had left behind, and many even believed that South Koreans were worse off than in the North. Which was actually true for a little while, but from the 1960s onward, the South Korean government became rapidly recovering from the devastation of war. By the 1980s, South Korea was flourishing, and one event in particular gave Sakhling Koreans a glimpse of just how far their country had come. 1998년에 서울을 88 soul Olympic games, everyone watched. And that was a time when Korean diaspora,

in Soviet Union, they felt it's extremely proud. So all the Koreans, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, This is my dad. He was 32 years old at the time and was watching the soul Olympics with his family. He says that everyone in Savelin watched. The house was full of elderly Koreans sitting in front of the television. He says that everyone kept talking about how developed Korea had become and how much progress it made. During the competitions, the older people were acting like kids again, cheering like children. Seen South Korea as a developed nation and watching Soviet and Korean athletes competing The world was changing, new political ties were forming, and technology was evolving. All of these things led to a line of communication finally opening up between Sul and Koreans and their home country, which happened for the first time in the year 1990, surprisingly, on national public television. This is from a KBS live broadcast called Reunions of Separated Families for Sao Ha-Hul in Koreans.

The goal of the special was to reunite Korean families who had been torn apart by war and geopolitical drama. South Korea and the Soviet Union arranged a video conference call where separated families were finally able to speak again over video link. In many cases, people were learning that their relatives were still alive on national television. In this clip, a Sakhling Korean man is seeing his mother for the first time in 45 years. He keeps saying mom, mom while she cries uncontrollably. Он все это говорит, что мама, мама, когда она угрозала, и контроллась. Вот кто сидел, не было на душах, все плаканы, все.

Здесь мой дед, и, again, он сказал, что никто не был в дефон. Все было в дефон. Большинство, кто по телемисту участвовал, она большинство все знала. His mother, my Babushka, was there watching too. She knew many of the people who participated in this broadcast. She would cry and she would say, I know her. And then she would tell him what their names were and what she remembered about them. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991,

Koreans on Soklin finally had an opening to return home, some went immediately. Returns mostly took place through visiting programs assisted by humanitarian organizations or by religious groups. But Yulidin from the Soklin Regional Museum says that the early years of return were incredibly rocky. She says it was a nightmare. People who really wanted to leave mostly had to either use their own money

or rely on relatives in South Korea. There was no governmental support to help people resettle at that time. They were people who wanted to leave Saham just for the sake of living. For them returning to Korea was the end goal. Many older Saham Koreans had been waiting for so long to repatriate that they were willing to move back at any cost. Some sold everything they had. Others left their spouses if they refused to go with them.

For many who returned in those early years, it was not the reunion they dreamed of for five decades. South Korea had changed completely, and now they were strangers in a new country, which should have felt familiar was foreign to them. Yule says that because many of the people repatriating were older, their relatives had already died, and at this late stage of life, it was difficult to start over again.

It was just an irrational desire to return. At the beginning, homeland is a nice place, but later on, homeland can become a real... Regardless of the difficulties, the goal of successful repatriation never went away. Throughout the 1990s, the new Russian government was much more open to letting people leave the country. The Korean and Japanese governments also started to acknowledge the existence of Soklin Koreans and wanted to do something to correct past injustices. In order to make a man's foe's part in using forced labor, the government of Japan earmarked 3.2 billion yen to pay for the transit, housing, and financial assistance of Sakhling Koreans.

The South Korean government provided land to build housing on. It was a joint venture between Russia, Japan, and then Korean government work together. It's an incredible diplomatic achievement. I understand for Russia, Japan, and Korea, because these three countries that they cannot talk each other, they have so many past issues, they agreed to do this and then they came through. So it's a big achievement. This international cooperation allowed people from Soklin

to move to a number of housing complexes and nursing homes across South Korea. And in the year 2000, a formal repatriation program was established. The first and only settlement constructed specifically for Soklin Koreans was built in South Korea. It was Kerhang-M Il, a hometown village. The very same community that I visited my grandparents at, in An Sun.

This complex was meant to address the problems associated with repatriation. Residents didn't just get free housing, but a support system to navigate a new country. More than a thousand elderly Sakhlin Koreans received a small apartment, along with a modest pension since most of the residents had retired or couldn't work. There was good healthcare available and friendly stuff. They also had access to the Korean and Japanese Red Cross on-site, who helped residents get anything they might need for their new homes.

Today, the community comprises eight different apartment buildings and houses more than 700 people. There's a lounge for plain Ma-jong and Lotto, which is like the Russian version of Bingo, and a room for plain table tennis. There's even a local choir and a karaoke room, all just for former Soklin Koreans. Residents have basically everything they would ever need without having to leave this small, Russian-Korean community. My grandma says that Kohangmael is quite livable and she took a liking to it.

She can talk to her grandchildren whenever she wants and she can travel back to Russia once a year. But having a comfortable life is a big change and idle hands are difficult to get used to. In the Soviet Union and Russia, all the Koreans fought to survive. Many people from this generation like my grandmother never learned how to just enjoy life. And with all of this time and no grandchildren around to take care of it wasn't an easy feeling. Yule Dinsgrandfather repatriated to South Korea in the early 2000s. And she says she thinks about something her grandfather said to her.

When she asked him how he liked Korea, he told her that there was nothing to do there, except one thing. To stare out of the window and wait until you die. to stare out of the window and wait until you die. But the biggest criticism with the Repatriation Program was that it was only available to a select few who qualified. Those who were born before August 15, 1945. The program was on-lope into what they called the first generation of Sakhling Koreans. This was the people who had been born prior to the end of World War II. This generation would be allowed to return to Korea and would be financially supported,

but only if they were willing to live behind the families that they had built on Sakhling. So in attempting to reunify separated families in Korea, the repatriation program ended up causing even more family separations. I mean, ideally, you just allow your whole family to come. However, imagine that you have already three generations. The first generation, second generation, third generation. So Tatyana, you are third generation? Yep.

Depending on the age when they were born, even second generation already they lost quite a bit of Korean language and as a South Korea it would be a foreign country. So this is the tragedy of the diaspora, right? Here's Jihun Park again. When they leave Sakhalin and go back to Korea, Now their homeland has become Sahallin. And then that takes some years for them to process. Oh God, it was not the land. Actually, it was the people that I was attached to. And then my people now in Sahallin, my homeland is now, my home is in Sahallin now.

My home is in Sahani now. In 2020, new legislation was passed that expanded the eligibility requirements for Soklin Koreans to repatriate. Now, the first generation are allowed to bring one direct descendant and that person's spouse. But for a lot of younger Soklin Koreans, it's less about returning to an ancestral homeland than it is a practicality. For them, there are both opportunities and obligations waiting in South Korea. My mom actually moved to Kohangma'il to care for my grandmother just last year. She is grateful for the chance to come to South Korea. They don't need to worry about rent on the apartment and she gets good health care there.

But for Sakhling Koreans, my mom's age, moving there is a completely different experience. I think, to the bones of my mother, I'm still Russian. I haven't used it yet, so when I think of Russia, I'm like a fish. My mom says that deep in her bones she is a Russian. In Russia, she feels like a fish in the pond. But in Korea, it's so little difficult. Even though she speaks the language, she still has trouble communicating with native Koreans, especially the younger ones.

Despite all the assistance that the South Korean and Japanese governments have provided, or the legislation that has been passed or housing complexes that were built, it simply isn't enough. Repatriation came 50 years too late. Much of the first generation who yearned to return to South Korea died long before the program started, and the people who did live to see their homeland again were too old to make the most of it. J. Hyeong Park says that the word where Go-hyeong Ma-il gets its name from is a powerful word in Korean. The literal translation is hometown, but it's a much bigger, Korea and it's like a very much, how you say? It's an emotional one, right?

Yeah, it's an emotional one. It's not attached necessarily to the concept of the nation. It's a land concept that is like a particular town village that they are born. People want to go back to the same particles, you know, in the land, same earth, same plants, trees around them. And that's where they believed that they were rooted. There is a monument in Savelin at the port in Korsaka.

It's a tall metal statue that looks like an abstract pair of sails pointing towards the sea. This monument is dedicated to the tens of thousands of forgotten Koreans who never got a chance to go home. I visited back in February. Starting in since I'm a sub-the-first recording. I'm at the Corsica port. Corsica is a small town. I see small houses. There is a plaque, of course. I translated some of it from Russian.

To those who haven't got to meet their motherland. August 1945. In Corsica port, there were 2,000 of our peers. I actually moved from Russia to the US a few months ago and wanted to visit the monument before I left. Anyway, it made me feel closer to this story. Even though I was leaving the country by choice, it wasn't clear when I'd be able to return home to Sao Hling. My dad actually drove me to the monument and on the way back we started talking about the 1988 Solar Olympics

and what it must have been like to see his homeland on television. He made a very important distinction that I hadn't really thought about before. Of the Tibet chasrojina. I hadn't seen you a know that Korea was his homeland, but my dad corrected me. No, for me it's not like that. Korea is just like a cheese. He said that the Soviet Union is his homeland.

Korea is his motherland. Motherland is the place that you are connected to by your ancestors. And even though he feels Korean, it will never feel like home. This is from a home video of my babushka. My grandmother from my father's side. It was her birthday back in the year 2000. She's standing and singing at her dining room table, which is full of Russian and Korean food.

Friends and relatives of both Korean and Russian descent are sitting together, drinking vodka, maybe a little too much vodka. She passed away in 2020, and I wish that I could have talked to her for this story. I will always remember how easily she moved between three languages, Korean, Russian, and Japanese. She mixed them up and made her own unique words and phrases. Babushka decided to remain on Saal and even though she was given the chance to leave. I'm so grateful that she stayed because she was a huge influence on my life. So much of me came from her.

The history of Koreans in Saeho-lin is a sad one, but it's not only about loss. I want to believe that it's also about the creation of something entirely new, a new mixed culture, new perspectives, new families, new lives. Even though Korea, Japan and Russia all had difficult political relationships with one another, Babushka brought the best parts of each identity together. She embraced them all to make something wonderful and different exactly where she was. She is a boy! She is a boy! She is a boy! She is a boy! The story was produced by Tautana Kim and Vivian Le, edited by Emmett Fitzgerald. Coming up, we wrap up the future of...

Over the last several months, we produced a series of episodes called The Future of Da Da Da. With the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we produced a series of episodes called The Future of Data-Data. With the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we've been exploring how changes the way we live, learn, work, and play may shape our health and well-being in years to come. The project was conceived at the very start of the COVID pandemic, so even though the features that we were looking at went well beyond that immediate health crisis, we used that drastic shake-up in our lives and routines to really look at our accepted status quo with fresh eyes. Our first episode was all about

the future of the office. It turned out that people have been going back and forth about what makes a healthy and productive office since there have been offices. So, you know, Facebook, when they were first emerging as a company they bought the old Sun Microsystems building in Menlo Park and doubled the amount of people in the same office space. Of course they didn't pitch it that way. They said oh my god this is so amazing. We have all this collaborative collisions and spontaneous interactions because everyone's in here and then they hired Frank Gary to design this giant warehouse next to the doubled-in-size sun-micro systems. And to me, that building looks exactly like the rose of desks of

like little telephone banks that secretaries had in the 1950s. But it was supposed to be so radical and so amazing that everybody was on the same floor and they were all going to be so innovative, but it's like so retrograde. The next episode was all about the future of broadband, which has become an essential utility in the modern world, but a last mile problem and a consortium of private internet service providers are keeping it from reaching all the people who need it. The goal of for-profit companies will always be to make money, which is why a lot of people still believe that quality internet access for everyone

means eventually treating broadband as a right, not just a commodity. And that requires intervention by people who are accountable to votes and not just dollars. Then we looked at the future of public health data and how an interconnected global population requires more modern approaches to the gathering and sharing of information critical to our survival. There are just so many examples of how our COVID data was unstandardized or incomplete.

Like, did you know that a lot of our local health departments are still at the mercy of fax machines? And finally, we still at the mercy of facts machines. And finally, we looked at the future of environmental law and conservation, with the rise of the environmental personhood movement. Rights of nature is pretty much what it sounds like, the idea that you could treat nature like a person, legally. Each story will entertain you and get your thinking about the future that we're all about to share.

All episodes are out now to scroll through or search the 99% invisible feed for the future of and listen. Thanks to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for their support. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Tatiana Kim and Vivian Lei edited by Emmet Fitzgerald, fact-checking by Graham Haysha, Mix and Tech Production by Martin Gonzales, Music by a director of sound, Swan Rial. Translation by a very own 99PI intern, Sarah Baker. You came just in the nick of time. Special thanks this week.

To E Soon Young, Park Sun Ok, E Soon Dinn, Ha Soon E, Kim Yoon Chow, Kim Okie, and of course, to Tatiana's Babushka,

Moon Ha Ok. 99% visible to executive producer is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kohl set is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Baroupe, Christopher Johnson, Losh Madon, Sophia Klatsker, Jason De Leon, Joe Rosenberg, and me Roman Mars. We are a part of the Stitcher & Serious XM podcast family,

now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building. You're beautiful. Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org. On Instagram and read it too. You can find links to other stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова Подайте, а-а-а! В ней лыло и коров! И за дождой, а-а-а! И с днём, когда дружит.