* 1875 – The Treaty of Saint Petersburg between Japan and Russia is ratified, providing for the exchange of Sakhalin for the Kuril Islands.

Their most widely known ethnonym is derived from the word ainu, which means " human " ( particularly as opposed to kamui, divine beings ), basically neither ethnicity nor the name of a race, in the Hokkaidō dialects of the Ainu language ; Emishi ( Ebisu ) and Ezo ( Yezo ) ( both ) are Japanese terms, which are believed to derive from another word for " human ", which otherwise survived in Sakhalin Ainu as enciw or enju.

The Ainu were distributed in the northern and central islands of Japan, from Sakhalin island in the north to the Kuril islands and the island of Hokkaidō and Northern Honshū, although some investigators place their former range as throughout Honshū and as far north as the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula in what is now Cape Lopatka.

The main feeding habitat of the western Pacific subpopulation is the shallow ( 5 – 15 m depth ) shelf off northeastern Sakhalin Island, particularly off the southern portion of Piltun Lagoon, where the main prey species appear to be amphipods and isopods.

Offshore gas and oil development in the Okhotsk Sea within 20 km of the primary feeding ground off northeast Sakhalin Island is of particular concern.

Of this, uses a broad rail gauge of, while a narrow gauge of is used on a 957-km ( 595-mile ) stretch of railway on Sakhalin Island.

# The above, plus Sakhalin Island, which is generally included on Chinese maps as part of Outer Manchuria, even though it is not explicitly mentioned in the Treaty of Nerchinsk.

The Sea of Okhotsk () is a marginal sea of the western Pacific Ocean, lying between the Kamchatka Peninsula on the east, the Kuril Islands on the southeast, the island of Hokkaidō to the south, the island of Sakhalin along the west, and a long stretch of eastern Siberian coast ( including the Shantar Islands ) along the west and north.

It is connected to the Sea of Japan on either side of Sakhalin: on the west through the Sakhalin Gulf and the Gulf of Tartary ; on the south, through the La Pérouse Strait.

Oceanic water in Avacha Bay and adjacent bays is also warmer than coastal waters of Kuril Islands and Okhotsk sea coast ( except Southern Kuriles and Southern Sakhalin ).

Sakhalin (, ; also known as Kuye (); Japanese: or ) or Saghalien, is a large island in the North Pacific, lying between 45 ° 50 ' and 54 ° 24 ' N.

It is part of Russia, and is Russia's largest island, and is administered as part of Sakhalin Oblast.

Sakhalin, which is about one fifth the size of Japan, is just off the east coast of Russia, and just north of Japan.

Sahaliyan, the word that has been borrowed in the form of " Sakhalin ", means " black " in Manchu and is the proper Manchu name of the Amur River ( sahaliyan ula, literally " Black River " ; see Sikhote-Alin ).

There is some evidence that the Ming eunuch admiral Yishiha reached Sakhalin in 1413 during one of his expeditions to the lower Amur, and granted Ming titles to a local chieftain.

Sakhalin is the largest island in Russia, being long, and wide, with an area of.

One theory is that Sakhalin arose from the Sakhalin island arc.

Nearly two-thirds of Sakhalin is mountainous.

Mamiya Rinzō and Gennady Nevelskoy determined that the Sakhalin was indeed an island separated from the mainland by a narrow strait.

Some researchers have speculated that this minority of Haplogroup C3 carriers among the Ainu may reflect a certain degree of unidirectional genetic influence from the Nivkhs, a traditionally nomadic people of northern Sakhalin and the adjacent mainland, with whom the Ainu have long-standing cultural interactions.

After the arrest of Keizo in 1967, Tamara and her son Alexei Nakamura were expelled from Kamchatka Krai and sent to the island of Sakhalin, to live in the city of Tomari.

In summer, however, sunshine hours are lowest on exposed parts of the Pacific coast where fogs from the Oyashio current create persistent cloud similar to that found on the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin.

They occur across East Asia, from 50 ° N latitude in Sakhalin through to Northern Australia, and west to India and the Himalayas.

Japan also received the southern half of the Island of Sakhalin from Russia.

Japan gained a great deal from the treaty, but it was not what the Japanese public had been led to expect, since Japan's initial negotiating position had demanded all of Sakhalin and a monetary indemnity as well.

The Dutch captain Maarten Gerritsz Vries in the Breskens entered the Sea of Okhotsk from the south-east in 1643, and charted parts of the Sakhalin coast and Kurile Islands, but failed to realize that either Sakhalin or Hokkaido are islands.

On 18 December 2011 the Russian oil drilling rig Kolskaya capsized and sank in a storm in the Sea of Okhotsk, some 124 km from Sakhalin Island, where it was being towed from Kamchatka.

This map from a 1773 atlas, based on the: commons: File: CEM-44-La-Chine-la-Tartarie-Chinoise-et-le-Thibet-1734-Amur-2572. jpg | earlier work by Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d ' Anville | d ' Anville, who in his turn made use of the information collected by Jesuit missions in China | Jesuits in 1709, asserts the existence of Sakhalin — but only assigns to it the northern half of the island and its northeastern coast ( with Cape Patience, discovered by Maarten Gerritsz Vries | de Vries in 1643 ).

According to Wei Yuan's work Military history of the Qing Dynasty (), the Later Jin sent 400 troops to Sakhalin in 1616, after a newfound interest because of northern Japanese contacts with the area, but later withdrew as it was considered there was no threat from the island.

South Sakhalin was administrated by Japan as Karafuto Prefecture (), with the capital Toyohara, today's Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, and had a large number of migrants from Korea.

It was not until the 113th Rifle Brigade and the 365th Independent Naval Infantry Rifle Battalion from Sovetskaya Gavan landed on 16 August at — a seashore village of western Sakhalin — that the Soviets broke the Japanese defence line.

Moneron, the only land mass in the Tatar strait, long and wide, is about west from the nearest coast of Sakhalin and from the port city of Nevelsk.

The Sea of Okhotsk ensures Sakhalin has a cold and humid climate, ranging from humid continental ( Köppen Dfb ) in the south to subarctic ( Dfc ) in the centre and north.

As a result, many 17th century maps showed a rather strangely shaped Sakhalin, which included only the northern half of the island ( with Cape Patience ), while Cape Aniva discovered by de Vries and the " Black Cape " ( Cape Crillon ) were thought to be part of the mainland.

Nearly all the cargo arriving for Sakhalin ( and the Kuril Islands ) is delivered by cargo boats, or by ferries, in railway wagons, through the SSC train ferry from the mainland port of Vanino to Kholmsk.

The idea of building a fixed link between Sakhalin and the Russian mainland was first mooted in the 1930s.

Russia is in the process of building a pipeline across the Tatar Strait from Sakhalin Island to De-Kastri terminal on the Russian mainland.

Strait of Tartary ( Gulf of Tartary, Gulf of Tatary, Tatar Strait, Tartar Strait, Strait of Tartar, also Chinese: 韃靼海峽, Japanese:, Mamiya Strait, Russian Татарский пролив ) is a strait in the Pacific Ocean dividing the Russian island of Sakhalin from mainland Asia ( South-East Russia ), connecting the Sea of Okhotsk on the north with the Sea of Japan on the south.

Accordingly, when La Pérouse charted most of the strait between Sakhalin and the mainland " Chinese Tartary " in 1787, the body of water received the name of the Strait ( or Channel, or Gulf ) of Tartary.

Since 1973, a rail ferry operates across the strait, connecting the port of Vanino, Khabarovsk Krai on the mainland with Kholmsk on Sakhalin Island.

A tunnel under the strait, to provide a road and / or rail connection between Sakhalin and the mainland, was begun under Joseph Stalin, but abandoned incomplete after his death.

The Sea of Japan is a marginal sea of the western Pacific Ocean, between the Asian mainland, the Japanese archipelago and Sakhalin.

The composition of terrestrial species on the Kuril islands is dominated by Asian mainland taxa via migration from Hokkaido and Sakhalin Islands and by Kamchatkan taxa from the North.

It is the closest significant settlement to the Strait of Tartary separating the mainland from Sakhalin.

As part of the project, Russia is in the process of building a pipeline across the Tatar Strait from Sakhalin Island to De-Kastri oil terminal on the Russian mainland.

The Sakhalin Railway has a connection with the mainland via a ferry operating between Kholmsk on the island and Vanino on the mainland.

Finding extensive shallows at the north end of the gulf he falsely concluded that Sakhalin was part of the mainland ( a common mistake ).

In 1973, a rail ferry link to the island Sakhalin was opened, joining the mainland at Vanino, north of Sovetskaya Gavan.

Since 1973, it has been the Sakhalin terminal of a SASCO train ferry to the port of Vanino on the Russian mainland, connecting the mainline rail network with that of the island.

Since Sakhalin railways use the Japanese gauge of, the railcars coming from the Russian mainland have their bogies changed in Kholmsk.

Some linguists believe the shared vocabulary between Ainu and Nivkh ( spoken in the northern half of Sakhalin and on the Asian mainland facing it ) is due to borrowing.

Orok oral tradition indicates that the Oroks share history with the Ulch people, and that they migrated to Sakhalin from the area of the Amgun River in mainland Russia.