During the colonial period (1910-1945), Korean workers were forced to go and work on the Japan-owned southern half of the Sakhalin Island for logging and mining industry. When Japan lost the war in 1945, the Japanese were repatriated.
However, the Koreans were left in the hands of the Soviet troops. This talk is about the life of those Korean men and women who lived there in despair, longing for their families in their homeland of Korea.
About the speaker
Changzoo Song is Senior Lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of Auckland. Receiving his Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Hawai’i as an East-West Centre Fellow, he worked in the United States, Latvia, and Ukraine joining the University of Auckland in 2002.
His research interests include nationalism, national identity, and Korean diasporic identities. He travelled in the Soviet Union, including Sakhalin, in the early 1990s when the country broke apart.