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Asia-Pacific Magazine
No. 1 April 1996
pp. 17-21.

Divided Lives: A Story of Indigenous People
and the Pacific War

by Tessa Morris-Suzuki

At the beginning of 1995, Japanese Prime Minister Murayama expressed his hope that the 50th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War would provide a turning-point - a moment at which Japan could come to terms with memories of the past and re-focus its attention on the future of relations with the Pacific region. A year later, however, there were still few signs that this hope had been fulfilled. The Japanese Parliamentary statement of regret for wartime aggression proved too cautious to satisfy the demands of many critics at home and abroad, while at the same time upsetting groups like the influential association of relatives of the war dead, who saw any apology as an insult to Japan's fallen soldiers. Issues of compensation to former prisoners of war, civilian detainees and women forced into wartime prostitution are also unresolved, and continue to be heatedly debated in the courts and the media.

Amidst all this controversy, however, there is one legacy of the war which has remained almost unnoticed. In March 1995 two women, Kim Yunshin and Nakagawa Lyuba, travelled from Sakhalin in the former Soviet Union to meet representatives of the Japanese government in Tokyo. They came to speak on behalf of the indigenous communities of southern Sakhalin: to ask for compensation and a fitting memorial for brothers and husbands whose lives were cut short by the Pacific War. It was, perhaps, to be expected that their story would not have been widely publicised, for the communities they represent are very small. At the beginning of the Pacific War the indigenous population of Southern Sakhalin - which was then the Japanese colony of Karafuto - numbered only about 2,500, and of these no more than 400 belonged to the Uilta and Nivkh language groups whom Kim Yunshin and Nakagawa Lyuba represent. Yet their story is worth re-telling because it vividly illustrates the tragedies of colonisation, national rivalries and war.

East Asian history is normally assumed to be the history of three states - China, Japan and Korea - states which not only dominate the region today but have done so for centuries. This triangular vision of the region's past, however, overlooks the mass of small communities, often without a formal state structure, which existed in the interstices between the dominant East Asian powers. Among these were the Ainu peoples of Hokkaido, the Kurile Islands and the southern half of Sakhalin, who in turn had close trading relations with the societies of Northern Sakhalin, the Kamchatka Peninsula on the easternmost fringe of Siberia.

Conventionally, these communities have been seen as exotic, isolated and static. Although they have been the subjects of some detailed anthropological studies, historians have seldom given them a glance, except when searching for the prehistoric origins of the dominant Chinese, Korean and Japanese ethnic groups. There has been little sense, therefore, that small non-state societies played an active part in the recent history of the region.

But in fact the small societies of East Asia were far from static. On the contrary, they formed part of a complex pattern of cultural and economic exchange, both with one another and with their larger neighbours. Rather than seeing them as remnants of ancient stages of human evolution, we can better understand them as representing particular forms of human adaptation to varied and often harsh environments. The history of Sakhalin provides a case in point. This long-narrow island, now part of the Russian federation, stretches north from the Japanese archipelago and runs parallel to the east coast of Siberia. Its climate is one of extremes - long bitterly cold winters and humid, misty summers when the forests are plagued with swarms of mosquitoes.

Yet between about the 4th and the 13th centuries AD the island formed part of a still mysterious cultural realm to which archaeologists have given the name "Okhotsk Culture". Although the bearers of the Okhotsk Culture are sometimes romantically referred to as the "Asian Vikings", it is not in fact known whether they were a single ethnic group or spoke a single language. What is known is that all around the southern half of the Okhotsk sea, from north coast of Hokkaido to the Kurile Islands and the northern tip of Sakhalin, people followed a broadly similar way of life based on fishing, sealing and whaling combined with the keeping of pigs and dogs. Their large underground houses were carefully designed to keep out the winter cold, and their spiritual life found expression in superb carvings of bears and of strange, long-headed people. Chinese coins excavated at Sredniya on the northernmost shores of the Okhotsk Sea testify to the extensive trade routes which crossed these frozen waters, linking the Okhotsk peoples both to the Chinese Empire and to their far northern neighbours.

The gradual disappearance of Okhotsk culture between the 10th and the 13th centuries may have reduced contact between the people of Sakhalin and their eastern neighbours, but links with the Asian mainland remained strong. From around the end of the 17th century the Chinese empire established a tributary relationship with some of the island's communities, and trading posts were set up along the Amur River near the coast of the Asian mainland. Here representatives of many ethnic groups from the surrounding regions would gather to present tribute to the Chinese empire, buy and sell merchandise, exchange news and arrange marriages. The Japanese explorer Mamiya Rinzo, who travelled to the trading post of Pul in the early 19th century, describes a lively if sometimes chaotic scene of market stalls laden with sable and fox furs, gemstones and metalware, and all around a babel of languages as traders bargained, quarrelled, greeted old friends and played with one anothers' children.

In this way, the narrow straits between the island and the mainland became a vital bridge in what is sometimes called the "northern silk route", linking China to Japan via Sakhalin and Hokkaido. Exquisite brocade garments, traded by Chinese merchants in exchange for precious furs, were bought by the people of Sakhalin and sold in turn to Japanese merchants, their designs helping to stimulate the development of Japan's own silk industry.

By the time the "northern silk route" was established, Sakhalin was inhabited by three groups of people speaking distinct languages: the Ainu, who also lived in Hokkaido and as far south as the northern tip of the main Japanese island of Honshu; the Nivkh, who also inhabited parts of the eastern shore of Siberia, and the reindeer-herding Uilta, who spoke a Tungusic language related to that of many groups on the Siberian mainland. Although their differing languages attest to distinct origins, the three groups had developed closely inter-related lifestyles, with each group developing its own niche within the delicate northern ecosystem.

Legends survive of fierce battles between the Uilta and Ainu; yet the relationship was largely a peaceful one. Myths, legends and beliefs were shared amongst the three groups, as were craft techniques and artistic designs. During the long summer evenings men carved wooden dishes and boxes with the beautiful, curving wave-like motifs which are characteristic of Uilta, Nivkh and Ainu art alike, while women embroidered similar patterns onto the hems of garments and fur boots. Skill at embroidery was the most prized accomplishment for women, and metal needles, which were obtained through trade with the Chinese or Japanese, were among a woman's most valued possessions. A 19th century traveller to Sakhalin describes how a Russian once came upon a Nivkh family all weeping bitterly. "'Why are you crying?' he asked, 'Is somebody dead?' 'No! What is death? It would have been better had somebody died. The needle is lost!'"

Enthusiastic traders that they were, the people of Sakhalin exchanged ideas, not just with one another, but also with outsiders. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as first Japanese merchants and fishermen and then Russian traders and settlers moved into their region, they acquired and adapted techniques from the outsiders. Little by little tobacco, rice, potatoes, and Russian-style shirts and handbags (embroidered, none the less, with distinctive Sakhalin designs) became part of their way of life, and by the late nineteenth century, the traditional spears, harpoons and arrow-traps were beginning to be supplemented by the use of hunting rifles.

But, for all their adaptability, the small societies of the north lacked the population and military strength to protect themselves from the inroads of powerful nation-states. Their modern history, in fact, is in many ways similar to the modern history of other small, non-state societies, such as native North American and Aboriginal Australian societies. The people of far northeast Asia, however, had the particular disadvantage of living in an area which came to mark the border between two of the most powerful, and most bitterly antagonistic, states of the modern world.

Japan was gradually extending its reach northwards, through the agency of licensed merchants who were granted the right to trade with specified areas. At first, the merchants' activities were limited to buying and selling goods, but during the 18th century they began to establish fisheries in which they employed the indigenous people, often under extremely harsh conditions. Meanwhile, Russian merchants and settlers were moving, first into Kamchatka, and then southward into the area of the Amur River, and by the 1850s the first Russian permanent outposts had been established on Sakhalin.

As the outer limits of Russian and Japanese expansion gradually converged, a collision of interests became inevitable. Until the 1870s, Sakhalin was officially defined as belonging jointly to the two powers, but in 1875 the Japanese government decided to hand control of the island to Russia in return for recognition of its sovereignty over the Kurile Islands. Predictably, the indigenous people of the region were given no say whatsoever in this agreement. Rather, they were chattels to be passed from hand to hand in the process of territorial exchange. Those who remained in their home villages were automatically assumed to come under the laws of whichever power controlled their land. This created particularly severe problems for the Sakhalin Ainu, many of whom had close ties with their fellow Ainu in Hokkaido. In the wake of the 1875 treaty, more than one-third of the Ainu inhabitants of the island were persuaded to move to Japan, and were settled in a village close to the modern city of Sapporo. Here, crowded together for the first time into an area of relatively dense population, they quickly succumbed to disease, and by the end of the century about half had died, mostly from epidemics of cholera and smallpox.

For those who remained on Sakhalin, the erosion of their traditional way of life was slower but no less inexorable. As early as 1859 Russia's Tsarist government had recognised the remote island as an appropriate place of penal servitude for some of the state's most hardened criminals. By 1904, the convict population of Sakhalin had reached 20,000. Russian hunters and fishing enterprises encroached on indigenous resources, and forests were cleared to provide fuel and farmland to sustain the growing number of reluctant settlers. Alcohol became widely available, and islanders were sometimes persuaded to "sell" their hunting rights for a few bottles of vodka.

The 1875 treaty, besides, proved to be just the beginning, rather than the end, of international rivalry for control of Sakhalin and its rich resources of timber, fish, coal and oil. In 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War, Japanese troops seized control of the island, and the ensuing peace treaty gave Japan the southern half of Sakhalin, below the 50th parallel, which became the Japanese colony of Karafuto. The island which had once been a pathway for trade between Japan and the northeast Asian continent was now severed by a single straight line separating two deeply hostile great powers, dividing the forests through which indigenous people had travelled and hunted, and splitting apart families, friends and trading partners.

Yet, despite the depth of the political divide, colonial attitudes to indigenous people on both sides of the border were oddly similar. Early 20th century political thought in Japan and Russia (as in other colonial powers) was deeply influenced by social evolutionary ideas which defined indigenous societies as "primitive" survivals of an ancient form of human organisation. Assimilationist policies were therefore combined with a strong strand of discrimination against the Ainu, Nivkh and Uilta inhabitants of Sakhalin.

In the Japanese south, the situation of the indigenous people was particularly complicated. After 1905, most of the surviving Ainu who had moved to Japan in the 1870s returned, retaining their full Japanese citizenship, but those Ainu families who had chosen to stay in their home villages, together with Nivkh and Uilta populations, were treated separately as "native" colonial subjects, with very limited civil rights. The original islanders, however, were not simply passive objects of colonial policy: sometimes they made their own views known. In 1930, for example, the Minister for Colonial Development, on an official tour of Karafuto, was met at one village by a delegation of Ainu, and presented with a petition demanding full civil rights. In response to these demands, the government eventually, in 1933, agreed to grant all Ainu inhabitants of the colony full citizenship, but their Nivkh and Uilta neighbours still continued to be classified separately as "natives".

Whether or not they possessed full citizenship rights, however, the indigenous people of the north became, in Japan as in the Soviet Union, targets of an assimilation policy designed to turn them into loyal members of their respective empires. A central feature of these policies was the removal of people from their small, scattered traditional communities, and their resettlement in larger villages where their ways of life could more easily be monitored and transformed. In the new villages, "Native Schools" were established, with great emphasis being placed on basic literacy and numeracy, handicrafts and the inculcation of nationalist ideals. The consequences of this training are described in an article published in a colonial journal just before the outbreak of the Pacific War. Its author, who visited a school for Nivkh and Uilta children, noted that the pupils were particularly quick to learn Japanese patriotic songs. Their drawings, on the eve of Pearl Harbour, were "pictures of soldiers, pictures of war, and pictures of battleships... but is the mentality here the same as that of Japanese children? What we see here, to be sure, is their world - blue seas glittering with ice, seals, reindeers - all drawn energetically and with a strange nostalgia..."

The story was much the same north of the border. Fully-fledged assimilation policies were not introduced until after the establishment of Soviet power on Sakhalin in the mid-1920s, but when they came they followed patterns very similar to those of the Japanese empire. Despite the official rhetoric of Stalin's "nationalities policy", which proclaimed the right to ethnic autonomy, indigenous children on Sakhalin were sent to boarding schools to be educated in Russian, while their parents were given lectures from visiting officials on the evils of shamanism and the significance of events like Red Army Day and the anniversary of the Paris Commune. In the Soviet zone, too, indigenous people were moved out of their existing settlements and into larger villages where they could be encouraged to join collective farms. The changing face of northern Sakhalin is captured in Soviet government reports of 1930s: the shining new machinery of a recently-established collective farm, for example, is contrasted with "shallow rectangular pits" in the surrounding countryside, which marked the only traces of a vanished Nivkh village.

On the outbreak of the Pacific War, young men from the Japanese settler and Ainu populations of Sakhalin were rapidly conscripted into the armed forces. Japan and the Soviet Union were signatories to a non-aggression pact, which meant that, in theory at least, Sakhalin was far removed from the main theatres of war. Yet there was always uncertainty about the Soviet Union's intentions, and Japanese strategists feared a sudden attack from the north.

By mid-1942, as Japan's rapid thrust into Asia faltered, the Imperial Army began to consider the possibility of supplementing their forces with non-ethnically Japanese colonial subjects. For the Nivkh and Uilta people of the colony of Karafuto, the call to join the war effort came in the summer of 1942. Officers in military uniform delivered postcards to their homes, ordering them to report for duty several days later. The recruits were trained to act as guides for Japanese troops, to observe and report on troop movements along the Soviet-Japanese border, and to undertaking perilous crossings of the frontier into Soviet territory. These surveillance missions were difficult and dangerous, involving journeys across remote stretches of tundra, often in temperatures of minus 20 or 30 degrees celsius; but it was only at the end of the war that the real sufferings began.

On 8 August 1945, in accordance with the terms of the Potsdam Treaty, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and Soviet troops quickly swept across the border into Japanese Karafuto. As the Japanese empire collapsed, tens of thousands of Japanese civilians crammed the ports in search of boats which would deliver them from the advancing enemy forces. Some of the Nivkh and Uilta inhabitants of Karafuto also tried to flee, but found themselves turned back when they reached the waterfront. Although the military had been willing to overlook fine distinctions of citizenship status in their recruitment procedures, the Nivkh and Uilta who hoped to find refuge in Japan soon discovered that they were ineligible for evacuation, because they lacked the all-important family registration documents which separated fully-fledged Japanese citizens from "native" colonial subjects. Once Soviet troops had established control over the region, the indigenous recruits who had served in the Japanese forces were rounded up and put on trial as "war criminals".

They were shipped to various labour camps in Siberia, given Russian names, and in many cases separated from other members of their own language group. Accustomed though they were to the harsh conditions of the tundra, even they rapidly succumbed to the woefully inadequate diet and to accidents caused by unsafe working conditions. Forgotten by the Japanese government, and of no interest to the Soviet state, all remained in the camps for at least seven years, and some for as long as fifteen years. Out of Karafuto's total Uilta and Nivkh population of about 400, more than 50 are known to have died during the war or from the effects of life in the labour camps.

For many years after the end of the War, the story of Japan's indigenous soldiers seemed to have vanished into the silences of history. Almost the entire Ainu population of Sakhalin migrated to Japan in the late 1940s, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s, after court cases which recognised them as being "Japanese in the broad sense of the word", a small number of Uilta and Nivkh islanders were also admitted to Japan. In Soviet Sakhalin, the official view was that the "ethnic problem" had been solved, and at least one text on the history and geography of Sakhalin, published in the 1960s, fails to mention that the island had ever had an indigenous population.

But then voices began to emerge from the silence. In 1978, the autobiography of Dahinien Gendanu was published in Japan. Gendanu was a Uilta man who had survived seven years in Siberian labour camps, and had migrated to Japan in 1955. His memoirs, written with the help of Japanese artist and academic Tanaka Ryo , presented a vivid picture of the indigenous experience in Japan's colonisation of Karafuto. Also with the support of Professor Tanaka, Gendanu began to campaign for a memorial for those who had died in the labour camps, and set a small museum - the Jakka Dukhuni or "keeping place of treasures", in far northern Japanese town of Abashiri - to display the cultural traditions of the indigenous people of Sakhalin. Requests to the Japanese government for a military pension or for any compensation for the postwar sufferings of the indigenous people, however, met with blank refusals. As far as the government was concerned, the Uilta and Nivkh, as "native" colonial subjects, had never been eligible for armed service; the Japanese officers who had recruited them had had no authority to recruit troops; and Gendanu and his comrades had never officially served in the Japanese armed forces.

But the impermeable barrier which the Cold War had drawn across the far north of East Asia was gradually weakening. With the advent of the Gorbachev era, it became possible, for the first time, for a few of the indigenous people of Sakhalin who had migrated to Japan to revisit their homeland. Within the Soviet Union, too, indigenous activists like the Nivkh author and poet Vladimir Sangi began openly to criticise the assimilationist policies of the past. In some areas with substantial Nivkh populations, Nivkh language classes were introduced into schools, Nivkh textbooks were published, and in 1990 the indigenous people of the Poronaisk region established a collective devoted to language revival and to making and selling traditional craft products.

After centuries of life on the disputed margins of other people's territory, the indigenous societies of the north were starting to reclaim their own space. The increasingly visible movement for Ainu rights in Japan has also encouraged steps towards the re-establishment of links between the indigenous peoples of the region. In 1984, the leading Ainu organisation, the Hokkaido Utari Association, put forward demands for a new law which would recognise Ainu as the original inhabitants of Hokkaido, the Kurile Islands and much of Southern Sakhalin and guarantee seats for Ainu representatives in the Japanese Diet (Parliament) and Hokkaido local assemblies. Japan's continuing territorial dispute with Russia over control of the Kurile Islands (annexed by Russia at the end of the Pacific War) has prompted some Ainu representatives to remind both governments that it was the Ainu themselves who had the oldest historical claim to the archipelago. This point was emphasised by the voyage of a "peace boat", carrying Ainu representatives which visited Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands in 1986, and provided the opportunity for a meeting between Hokkaido Ainu and Uilta and Nivkh groups on Sakhalin.

Dahinien Gendanu died in 1984, with his claim for compensation still unresolved, but in 1995 his niece Nakagawa Lyuba was one of the two emissaries from Sakhalin who met with representatives of the Japanese government in Tokyo. Their requests were quite modest: they asked for assistance in constructing a memorial to their dead, compensation for the bereaved families, and a little support in re-establishing their own indigenous co-operatives in Sakhalin. The government's response was silence: a silence which gradually became more audible with each passing month. From the Japanese government's perspective, the claim of this small group is just one part of much larger potential avalanche of war-related claims which they expect to descend upon them if they give way on any front. But money, of course, is only one part of the story. To recognise the claims of the indigenous people of Sakhalin would be to recognise some of the darker forgotten episodes in modern colonial history, but also to recognise a forgotten richness in the history of the region: a history of extraordinary human variety and adaptiveness. It would be one step towards recovering a sense of history of East Asia, not just as a story of empire building and economic miracles, but a matter of "humanity's knowledge of itself" in all its kaleidoscopic diversity.

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