While the predominant majority of Sakhalin Japanese were eventually evacuated to Japan in 1946 – 1950, tens of thousands of Sakhalin Koreans ( and a number of their Japanese spouses ) remained in the Soviet Union.

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 first problem that caused the pause in reconnaissance flights took place on August 30, an Air Force Strategic Air Command ( SAC ) U-2 flew over Sakhalin Island in the Far East by mistake.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Contact with the Russians and constant demand for fur taxes pushed the Evenkis east all the way to Sakhalin island, where some still live today ( Cassell ’ s ).

It barely survives in southern Sakhalin where it was the main native language.

Shamanism remains an important cultural practice of the ethnic groups of Siberia and Sakhalin, where several dozen groups live.

As the Cold War begins, Von Stalhein enters the services of the Communist bloc, until his former masters imprison him on the island of Sakhalin, from where Biggles helps him escape in Biggles Buries a Hatchet.

However, he is regarded as having come from Teshikaga, Hokkaidō, where he moved to as a child after the Soviet Union took control of Sakhalin in 1945.

Shortly after his arrival in New Archangel, he proceeded by water to Kamchatka, where he dispatched his ships to wrest the island Sakhalin of the lower Kuril group from Japan, then started overland for Saint Petersburg to obtain the tsar's signature to the treaty, and also personal letters to the pope and king of Spain that he might ask for the dispensation and the royal consent necessary for his marriage.

However, on 20 August 1904 pursuing Japanese cruisers forced the ship aground at Sakhalin, where it was destroyed by the crew after engaging the Japanese at the Battle of Korsakov.

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.

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 Korean Air Lines Flight 007, carrying 269 people, was shot down in 1983 after straying into the USSR's prohibited airspace, in the vicinity of Sakhalin and Moneron Islands, President Ronald Reagan issued a directive making GPS freely available for civilian use, once it was sufficiently developed, as a common good.

Among the indigenous people of Sakhalin are the Ainu on the southern half, the Oroks in the central region, and the Nivkhs on the northern part.

The Mongol Empire made some efforts to subjugate the native people of Sakhalin starting in about 1264 CE.

However, the Ainu people did have a name for all of their domain, which included Hokkaido along with the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin, and parts of northern Honshu, which was Ainu Mosir (), a name taken by the modern Ainu to refer to their traditional homeland.

The southeastern part of the Strait of Tartary was the site of one of the tensest incidents of the Cold War, when on September 1, 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, carrying 269 people including a sitting U. S. congressman, Larry McDonald, strayed into the Soviet air space and was attacked by a Soviet Su-15 interceptor just west of Sakhalin Island.

Until the twentieth century, Ainu languages were also spoken throughout the southern half of the island of Sakhalin and by small numbers of people in the Kuril Islands.

* Immigrants from the northern route ( 北方ルート in Japanese ) include the people from Korean Peninsula, Mainland China, Sakhalin Island, Mongolia, and Siberia.

After the end of World War II, many Nivkh people and Orok people from southern Sakhalin, who held Japanese citizenship in Karafuto Prefecture, were forced to repatriate to Hokkaidō by the Soviet Union as a part of Japanese people.

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.

It may also be related to names for other islands that have traditionally been inhabited by the Ainu people, such as Kuyi or Kuye for Sakhalin and Kai for Hokkaidō.

On September 1, 1983, the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 with 269 people aboard, including sitting Congressman Larry McDonald, when it violated Soviet airspace just past the west coast of Sakhalin Island near Moneron Island — an act which Reagan characterized as a " massacre ".

Besides people from other parts of the former Soviet Union, the oblast is home to Nivkhs and Ainu, with the latter having lost their language in Sakhalin recently.

The indigenous people of Sakhalin are the Nivkhs, Oroki, and Ainu minorities.

The Ainu languages that are now spoken by Ainu minorities in Hokkaidō ; and were formerly spoken in southern and central Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands ( an area also known as Ezo ), and perhaps northern Honshū island by the Emishi people ( until approximately 1000 CE ), are associated with the founding Jōmon people of Japan from than 14, 000 years ago or earlier, and the Satsumon culture of Hokkaidō, although the Ainu also had contact with the Paleo-Siberian Okhotsk culture whose modern descendants include the Nivkh people ( whose original homeland was mostly occupied by the Tungusic people ), which could have linguistically influenced the Ainu language.

During his reign, the Yuan completed the subjugation of Sakhalin, forcing its Ainu people to accept their supremacy in 1308.

File: RIAN archive 400844 Large-scale Russian-Japanese exercise in Sakhalin to prevent criminal activity at sea. jpg | A coast guard patrol vessel and border guard aircraft of the Russian Federal Security Service took part in the Russian-Japanese exercise in Aniva Bay to practice halting criminal activity at sea, ship and people rescue operations.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.