In 1985, the Japanese government offered transit rights and funding for the repatriation of the original group of Sakhalin Koreans; however, only 1,500 of them returned to South Korea in the next two decades.

[7] In 1920, ten years after the annexation of Korea by Japan, there were fewer than one thousand Koreans in the whole of Karafuto Prefecture, overwhelmingly male.

[7][9] However, as Japan's war effort picked up, the Japanese government sought to put more people on the ground in the sparsely-populated prefecture in order to ensure their control of the territory and fill the increasing demands of the coal mines and lumber yards.

[10] Of those, around 10,000 mine workers were relocated to Japan prior to the war's end; present-day Sakhalin Koreans' efforts to locate them proved futile.

[11] The Imperial Japanese Army in Karafuto frequently used local ethnic minorities (Oroks, Nivkhs, and Ainu) to conduct intelligence-gathering activities, because, as indigenous inhabitants, their presence would not arouse suspicion on the Soviet half of the island.

[15] The sole survivor, a Korean known only by his Japanese name Nakata, had survived by hiding in a toilet; he later offered testimony about the event.

[10] The Soviet government initially had drawn up plans to repatriate the Koreans along with the Japanese, but the local administration on Sakhalin objected, arguing that incoming Russians from the mainland would not be sufficient to replace the skilled labourers who had already departed.

The ships that they eagerly expected [to take them home] did not show up after all, making [them] sob bitterly and go away in tears.Some sources claim Stalin himself blocked their departure because he wanted to retain them as coal miners on the island.

[20] In 1957, Seoul appealed for Tokyo's assistance to secure the departure of ethnic Koreans from Sakhalin via Japan, but Tokyo took no real action on the request, and blamed Soviet intransigence for the lack of progress in resolving the issue; Japan continued its earlier policy of granting entrance only to Sakhalin Koreans who were married to Japanese citizens, or had a Japanese parent.

However, the Sakhalin Koreans were believed to have been "infected with the Japanese spirit", and so for the most part the authorities did not trust them to run any of their own collective farms, mills, factories, schools, or hospitals.

During the late 1950s, it became increasingly difficult for the Sakhalin Koreans to obtain Soviet citizenship, and a growing proportion chose instead to become North Korean citizens rather than to deal with the burdens of remaining stateless, which included severe restrictions on their freedom of movement and the requirement to apply for permission from the local government in order to travel outside of Sakhalin.

This level of open dissent provoked the authorities to completely reverse their liberalising stance towards the Sakhalin Koreans; they arrested more than 40 protestors, and in November 1976 deported them, but to North Korea rather than to the South as they desired.

[26] Through to the early 1980s, locally born Korean youth, increasingly interested in their heritage, were seen as traitors by their Russian neighbours for wanting to know more about their ancestral land and for seeking to emigrate.

[4] In 1985, Japan agreed to approve transit rights and fund the repatriation of the first generation of Sakhalin Koreans;[29] the Soviet Union also began to liberalize their emigration laws in 1987.

[36][37] North Korea negotiated with Russia for closer economic relations with Sakhalin,[38] and sponsored an art show in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in 2006.

By the end of 2002, 1,544 people had settled there and in other locations, while another 14,122 had travelled to South Korea on short-term visits at the expense of the Japanese government.

[41] South Korean investors also began to participate in the international tenders for works contracts to develop the Sakhalin Shelf, as they are interested in the potential supply of liquefied natural gas.

With the relaxation of internal migration controls and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russians began moving en masse back to the mainland, making ethnic Koreans an increasing proportion of the population; there were fears that they might become a majority of the island's population, and seek an autonomous republic or even independence.

[45] However, the rise of the regional economy and the cultural assimilation of the younger generations drove more than 95% of Koreans to stay in Sakhalin or move to the Russian Far East rather than leave for South Korea, as they have come to consider Russia their home country.

However, Sakhalin Koreans who have travelled to the mainland of Russia, or have relocated to there (a population of roughly 10,000), report that they have encountered various forms of racism.

[51] Additionally, during the Soviet era, Sakhalin Koreans were often hired to act as announcers and writers for official media aimed at the Koryo-saram in Central Asia.

[52] Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there has been significant growth in religious activities among the Sakhalin Koreans; the establishment of churches was noted in scholarly articles as early as 1990.

[53] Christian hymns have become popular listening material, supplementing the more typical Russian, Western, and Korean pop music.

[56] Ethnic Koreans are numerous among the church-goers of St. James Cathedral, seat of the Apostolic Prefecture of Yuzhno Sakhalinsk, in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.

The Ethnos Arts School was established in 1991 in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk to teach children's classes in traditional Korean dance, piano, sight singing, and the gayageum, a zither-like instrument supposedly invented around the time of the Gaya confederacy.