* 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 separated from the mainland by the narrow and shallow Mamiya Strait or Strait of Tartary, which often freezes in winter in its narrower part, and from Hokkaidō, ( Japan ) by the Soya Strait or La Pérouse Strait.

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

Nearly two-thirds of Sakhalin is mountainous.

Some of the Sea of Okhotsk's islands are quite large, including Japan's second largest island, Hokkaidō, as well as Russia's largest island, Sakhalin.

With currently one 3, 400 m concrete runway, one passenger terminal, two cargo terminals and 16 aircraft stands, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk Airport is the largest airport in the Sakhalin region.

The transport center largest on Sakhalin into which structure enter 2 sea nonfreezing ports, 3 railway stations and knot of highways.

On Sakhalin island, there are a few dozen people who identify themselves as Sakhalin Ainu, but many more with partial Ainu ancestry do not acknowledge it.

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.

Railways in Russia, unlike in the most of the world, use broad gauge of, with the exception of 957 km on Sakhalin island using narrow gauge of.

Roosevelt first proposed that a neutral committee propose concessions that Russia would cede to Japan, but after the idea's rejection, Roosevelt convinced Japan to lay down its demand for an indemnity and accept the southern half of Sakhalin rather than the island as a whole.

Russian explorers Ivan Moskvitin and Vassili Poyarkov were the first Europeans to visit the Sea of Okhotsk ( and, probably, the island of Sakhalin ) in the 1640s.

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

Sakhalin was claimed by both Russia and Japan in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, which led to bitter disputes between the two countries over control of the island.

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.

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.

Japan proclaimed its sovereignty over Sakhalin ( which they called Karafuto ) yet again in 1865 and the government built a stele announcing this at the northern extremity of the island.

A katorga ( penal colony ) was established by Russia on Sakhalin in 1857, but the southern part of the island was held by the Japanese until the 1875 Treaty of Saint Petersburg ( 1875 ), when they ceded it to Russia in exchange for the Kuril Islands.

The northern, Russian, half of the island formed Sakhalin Oblast, with the capital in Aleksandrovsk-Sakhalinsky.

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

Following the Opium War, Russia forced China to sign the Treaty of Aigun ( 1858 ) and Convention of Peking ( 1860 ), under which China lost to Russia all claims to all territories north of Heilongjiang ( Amur ) and east of Ussuri, including Sakhalin.

Japan renounced its claims of sovereignty over southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands in the Treaty of San Francisco ( 1951 ), but claims that four islands currently administered by Russia were not subject to this renunciation.

Sakhalin is connected by regular flights to Moscow, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, and other cities of Russia.

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

* La Perouse Strait, a strait between the Russia island of Sakhalin and the Japanese island of Hokkaido

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.

Russia wasted little time after the Triple Intervention to move men and materials down into the Liaodong to start building a railroad from both ends — Port Arthur and Harbin, as it already had railway construction in progress across northern Inner Manchuria to shorten the rail route to Russia's sole Pacific Ocean naval base at Sakhalin Island, a port closed by ice four months of each year.

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

alt = The waters that are bordered by Sakhalin in the north-east, Japan in the east and south, Korea in the west and continental Russia in the north are marked with a question mark.

Japan made territorial delimitation treaty with Russia in 1875, Japan gained all the Kuril islands in exchange for Sakhalin island.

As a result, Russia lost the part of Sakhalin Island south of 50 degrees North latitude ( which became the Karafuto Prefecture ), as well as many mineral rights in Manchuria.

As Irina Ratushinskaya writes in the introduction to that work: " Abandoning everything, he travelled to the distant island of Sakhalin, the most feared place of exile and forced labour in Russia at that time.

There are also small numbers of Japanese people in Russia some whose heritage date back to the times when both countries shared the territories of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands ; some Japanese communists settled in the Soviet Union, including Mutsuo Hakamada, the brother of former Japanese Communist Party chairman Satomi Hakamada whose daughter Irina Hakamada is a notable Russian political figure.

The Kuril Islands or Kurile Islands (,, or ; ; Japanese: ), in Russia's Sakhalin Oblast region, form a volcanic archipelago that stretches approximately northeast from Hokkaidō, Japan, to Kamchatka, Russia, separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the North Pacific Ocean.