Success of Sakhalin Koreans Has a Price

This is the fifth and last in a series of articles highlighting Koreans inSakhalin.

By Andrei Lankov

Korea Times Colunist

SAKHALIN ― Nowadays, Koreans are easy to spot on the streets of Sakhalin. Many of the people whom you encounter there, including some beautiful girls and gorgeous ladies, are clearly Korean; Korean eateries are everywhere, and the Korean consumption goods rule supreme at the local shops. When I was on the island in September, it was preparing for elections, and of course Koreans were well represented among the candidates, including one running for mayor.

There is no doubt that Sakhalin Koreans have finally become a success story. Nonetheless, things are not that simple. The success also meant assimilation, and younger generations of Koreans drift away from the culture of their ancestors.

They might be proud of their heritage and still enjoy spicy Korean pickles, but for all practical purposes they belong to the Russian culture. The dreams of the Korean cultural revival, quite common in the heyday of ``perestroika,'' proved to be just dreams. The actual impact of the Soviet collapse on the community was opposite. It sped up the assimilation.

For people of Sakhalin, the disintegration of the Soviet system in 1991 was a mixed blessing. Initially, the island experienced a wave of enthusiasm for democracy and market economy. However, the events of the early 1990s dealt a heavy blow to the region which heavily depended on the government subsidies. It was soon discovered that per mile transportation costs on the island were some five times higher than on the continent, and that the locally produced paper of which the quality was indeed admirable, could not compete with much cheaper paper from Finland. Unemployment became the norm, and incomes shrank.

The locals remember the 1990s as a nightmarish time when apartment buildings in the countryside were not heated during the cold winters and when crime was rampant.

A local Korean told me: ``I do not know any family house which was not then broken into at least once. People sometimes tried to protect their houses and stayed there, but the only result was that the owners themselves were severely beaten.'' So, it comes as no surprise that nowadays many locals long for the lost stability of the Soviet days. That large statue of Lenin still dominates the main square of Yuzhnosakhalinsk and incidentally, the above mentioned Korean candidate ran on the ticket of the Communist party. It wasn't until the early 2000s that the economic situation began to improve thanks to an oil boom: large oil deposits were discovered in the seas around the island.

However, for the Korean community, perestroika meant a change for the better. The most important change was the ``opening'' of South Korea ― the land of their ancestors. Since the late 1980s, stories about material prosperity and technological success of South Korea had been widely reported in the press and enthusiastically retold by Koreans. Visits to Seoul soon became commonplace, and nowadays ASIANA operates daily flights to the island.

These contacts brought new employment opportunities, but also a new self-perception. For decades, the Koreans saw North Korea as ``their country'' ― and everybody knew that it was a destitute dictatorship. The ``discovery'' of South Korea in the late 1980s, after the 1988 Olympics, changed the world's perception of Koreans. The cultural associations, language classes, circles of national dance and other similar organizations flourished in the new environment. It became fashionable to say that the general revival of Korean culture and language was just behind the corner.

Finally, in the late 1990s, persistent efforts of the Korean activists and their friends in Japan persuaded South Korea and other countries to solve the oldest problem in the community. Japan and Korea jointly funded the construction of a special apartment complex near Incheon.

This complex houses those elderly Koreans who wish to come back to Korea. One has to be born before 1945 to be eligible for this program. The returnees are entitled to normal South Korean social benefits and an old age pension. As of January 2009, there were 2,300 elderly Sakhalin Koreans who resided in this apartment complex. Finally, they realized the dream which once was so important.

Meanwhile, their children and grandchildren are remarkably good at adjusting to the new life on the island. Koreans are overrepresented among the elite professionals of Sakhalin nowadays. The post-Soviet social transformation meant that past restrictions became irrelevant. The quite discrimination disappeared as well. Now, the suspicious political background of ``Sakhalin Koreans'' does not matter.

However, contrary to earlier expectations, this success did not translate into the revival of Korean culture. In the early 1990s, many young Koreans began to study their ancestors' language, but nearly all of them soon gave up. For native speakers of Russian, Korean is exceedingly difficult, but fluency in Korean does not help the average inhabitant of Sakhalin that much. So, younger Koreans tend to make a rational choice: they prefer to study English or, if they want a challenge, Japanese. (There are many Japanese businesses on the island.) This year, the Korean department of the Yuzhnosakhalinsk State University could not even find enough applicants to fill the quota for fully subsidized students ― that is, students who study for free.

Facing the challenge, some Korean activists insist that one should not excessively worry about preserving the language, since this is clearly non-realistic, and instead concentrate on non-language aspects of Korean culture.

This is, probably, an expected outcome: social success often means a great deal of assimilation.

The writer is an associate professor of Kookmin University. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.