3.1 Karafuto’s Total War

The official beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War by the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7th, 1937 (Rokōkyō Jiken) marks in classic modern Japanese historiography the swing to total war that eventually led to the downfall of the Japanese Empire. However, it is difficult to state whether or not the total war in China actually began in that year. In reality, hostilities had already commenced unofficially even during the 1920’s with the assassination of the warlord of Manchuria Zhuang Zaolin or the invasion of Manchuria by the Kwantung Army in 1931 (Manshū Jiken) and the subsequent installation of the puppet state of Manchukuo^[112]. Nevertheless, the date of 1937 gives us a good starting point for the historic period that unfolded under the name of the Fifteen-Years War (Jūgonen Sensō), extendable to the end of the American Occupation of Japan in 1952.

Total war here is defined here as the mobilization of a society as a whole into the war effort, in the case of an industrialized society the whole productive system generally put under the service of the military efforts. In environmental terms, the consequences of total war could be translated to the mobilization of the whole material base of one society in terms of energy, labor, capital and resources. Socially speaking, the war justified often the gain of control of the state over the society and the militarization of it in a total cultural fashion under the flag of patriotism^[113]. The narrative presented here is a general pattern but could vary widely from one case to another. In the case of Japan, the National Mobilization Law (Kokka Sōdōin Hō) implemented on March 24th 1938 was the legal base for the Imperial Army and for the State to extend its control to a wide array of the every aspects of the home front ordinary live while the governor-general, in colonies, hardened the grip of the Japanese occupation on the colonized societies, not without resistance^[114].

World War II, as underlined by historians such as William Tsutsui and Timo Saikku, was obviously a war of resources and industrial capacity. The war was won majorly because of the overwhelming industrial capacities on the qualitative and quantitative terms by the Allied over the Axis^[115]. Even the war originated, at least partly, for a craving from separate imperialist powers to create by the means of war their own bloc or sphere of influence where they could extract enough resources to ensure a viable autarkic market. From the environmental perspective, the war industrial had severe materials underpinnings in the form of an augmented intensity for energy and resources and capital, while the efficiency of the productive apparatus would be as not as efficient in times of peace, creating a more or less significant waste in the process, without mentioning the following loss and productive faculties and the devastations caused by military operations themselves. In the Japanese context, the war represented a tremendous toil and cost for the whole Empire or home islands. The extractive industries such as forestry and fishing attained heights with a peak in 1941 while the cadences of work on the home front ramped up dramatically as led to an overall depletion of local ecosystems, sacrificed for the sake of war by the belligerent. The period deserved well to be called a “dark valley” by William Tsutsui in the eponym article^[116]. For the colonized, exploitation attained its pinnacle as most of the population would be brigaded forcefully and treated as expandable labor for the most difficult posts like mining or logging.

One of the specificities of wartime Japan wasn’t specially to use the card of patriotism to justify the war effort and its implications, but instead to be put apart by a local declination of fascism or statism in the form of a discourse centered around the figure of the emperor^[117]. The Shōwa statism pushed to its furthest extent the concept of Yamato Tamashii or “Japanese spirit”, similar to an elaborate form of corporatism where each individual was reduced to a cell, a mere component of the social body seen as a biological entity, linked spiritually to the imperial figure.

For Karafuto, the beginning of the war and the general mobilization rhymed with an equal mobilization for every sector of the economy of Karafuto, with an accent put on the paper and fishing industries, the coal industry augmented slightly still the competition of Manchuria’s coal mines shadowed that side^[118]. The extracted material was processed on site before being sent to other industrial centers of the home islands. The coal coming from the Kawakami mine was burned to fuel predominantly the local industrial fabric while the rest was exported to different parts of the empire. The most energy intensive industries were locally the paper and the cement industry, needing a lot of coal in the form of heat to nurture their own industrial processes, orienting itself to the center of the economy^[119]. Until 1941, the beginning of the Pacific War, the compensation of the imported pulp and the augmentation of need for paper for the army triggered a strong increase in the production of pulp and paper during the period. Thus, the southern part of the island became for a time the biggest produce of pulp and sulfite paper, even evincing its neighbor and competitor Hokkaidō^[120]. The paper made from sulfite pulp or derived from the kraft process created by the German chemist Carl F. Dahl in 1879 had the property to be more resistant than mechanical processed paper. The obtained product was used mainly for packaging or cardboard, or for printing and writing purposes. The dissolving pulp could be used for other uses derived products based on cellulose as well, such as polymers or rayon and fuels made from the fermentation of the degraded cellulose. Under the aegis of zaibatsu or economic conglomerates collaborating with the wartime State such Mitsui or Ōji Paper Company, wartime labor restructured itself into a more concentrated landscape with a large workforce concentrated in a few corporations^[121].

With the drafting of an important part of the male labor force in Karafuto with general mobilization, the labor market sought urgently to fill the gap opened by this sudden absence. One part was compensated by female labor, similar to the case of the munitionettes in wartime France, or the other part was to import labor from the colonies or forced labor, both solutions not being mutually exclusive. One of the largest minorities still residing to this day in Karafuto were the Koreans, who were employed as a substitute labor in different sectors, especially subaltern tasks^[122]. The racialist and wartime pressure rhetoric from corporate managers contribute to create terrible working conditions for the subject workers coming from various locations throughout the empire. As the war stagnated in China and as the material conditions deteriorated, the working conditions became likewise harsher.

As shown with the case of Korea with David Fedman, the forests of Korean peninsula underwent what was denounced as the “great forest plunder” during the postwar period by Korean scholars^[123]. The forests of Karafuto, more largely Sakhalin island, had already experienced reckless management by the local Karafuto Agency and forest depletion. During wartime Japan, the dramatic increase of the paper production or other pulp products encouraged the logging industry to keep up and to ramp up felling cadences. It became clear that forests, as well as other forest areas of the empire, paid a terrible toll and even sacrificed to the imperial projects of a few actors. The natural resources of Karafuto underwent the same fate and would be exploited at a higher rate than in peacetime: fisheries in coastal areas saw a decrease due to the excessive stress put upon them by the increasing yields by Japanese fishermen^[124]. Coal and ore fields saw higher rates of extraction as well until the turning point of the Pacific War which marked the beginning of the end for the Japanese coal industry^[125]. The consequences of the war exploitation were already known but to an even worse degree. The siltation of rivers, soil erosion and the pollution of streams and air incarnated the lingering scars of the ongoing lost war^[126].

Even though the government issued regulations to hinder the complete erasure or exhaustion of the island’s forest, the sources are scarce to verify to put precise numbers on the extent of the environmental destruction fueling the war and the measures taken by the government to control. Problem was the inherent contradiction between the imperatives to keep the industrial engine functioning and the thought of conservation of resources for the longer term. In most cases, the cause of the war won over the consideration of conservation and because of the insatiable hunger of the military complex for pulp and its derivatives. The main industrial operators of the Fifteen Years War period were the Ōji and Fuji Paper Companies and worked in association with the government under a sacred union of the public and private sectors for the sake of the imperial expansion^[127].

3.2 Northern or Southern Option

The beginning of the Pacific War marked a turning point in the island's history, even though Karafuto was a backwater theater of operations until the very end of the war. The military maneuver to expel the Russian presence from Sakhalin was part of a larger plan that divided the Japanese general staff between the direction to give to the suites of military operations. The Northern option was mostly pushed forward by the Land Army and the Kwantung Army, advocating strongly for a northbound advance to Siberia and the Asian interior in Northern China. This implied another confrontation with the Red Army, that happened eventually with the Battle of the Khalkhin Gol, which signified an utter military defeat for Japan and the end of a Northern expansion. In this perspective, Sakhalin would have been used as a launching ground for further military expansion into the Russian subarctic regions.

For this reason, the gaichi of Karafuto had been put in the same military administered area of Hokkaidō, the defense zone n°1. The headquarters were based in Asahikawa in the north of Hokkaidō and occupied by the 7th infantry division, reputed to be an experienced unit and was actually the same that led different operations since its creation in 1888. Most of the contingent counted long-time serving soldiers having fought in Manchuria on the Russian border, specializing in Arctic warfare. Again, the events stress how much the two neighboring islands are closely connected together on different levels^[128]. To prepare for a potential invasion of district 1 by American or Soviet forces and to prevent an attack from the other side of the border, the 7th division launched a series of fortifications alongside the Russo-Japanese border. This renewed militarization of the border landscape equated to a further engineering of the space by the construction of fortifications. The type of fortification found in the Shikuka and Esutoru areas consisted in semi-underground reinforced concrete bunkers, inspired by German models (Blockhaus) with galleries and other amenities for prolonged operability even during combat. For the first time, we found several airstrips constructed in Shikuka and Esutoru compared to what we could identify as such. In truth, most of the operations and traffic in and out of Karafuto were sustained by a large fleet that circulated between Hokkaidō and the other home islands^[129]. The Lapérouse and Tsugaru straits became vital passages for the strategic and economic purposes and were chokepoints for Japanese when the tides of war began to change, with Allied boats making incursions more and more frequently into territorial waters.

On the other side of the border, the Red Army prepared as well for the eventuality of a local eruption of violence as tensions rose between both empires and the atmosphere of suspicion heightened with the years, especially after the battle of the Khalkhin Gol, deterring the Japanese from going further North. The buildup of Soviet forces near the border and more largely in the north part of Sakhalin rimed as well with the construction of defense infrastructures and defense positions, though it didn’t rival the level of the Japanese because of the recentness of development spur on that part of the island. Moreover, Russians had more and more on their plate in the West, when war was declared in 1939 against Poland or during the Winter War in 1939-40. After the Neutrality Treaty was signed in 1941 between Russia and Japan, reflecting the negotiations Germany and Japan had two years prior, the Wartime Empire still tried to plan an invasion of Sakhalin as a launching ground for further advance into the Soviet Far East. The plan reflected the Meiji-era Japanese project of “line of interest” as formulated by Yamagata Aritomo (1838-1922) in a speech in 1890^[130]. This option was pushed by the Land Army and the zaibatsu who were pushing for the expansion of colonial operations in Siberia, interested in resources. The Hokushin-ron or “Northern Expansion Doctrine” took shape by establishing plans for occupation of Kamchatka and for further expansion to Alaska and to the Arctic Circle. At the same time, the central government crafted the weaponized concept of panasiatism under the flag of “Great East Asian Sphere of Co-prosperity” (Dai Tōa Kyōeiken). On the ground, it took the overall shape of the fortification of Karafuto with the extensive construction of different lines of fortifications and a military build-up in the region. This was a continuation of the search from the Japanese Empire to find the fuel it lacked to sustain its war effort, in order to solve the commercial embargo, put on Japan by the United States.

By December 1941 and the attack on Pearl Harbor, the military authorities opted for the Southern Advance Option (Nanshinron), promoted by the Imperial Navy based on the important oil reserves of the Dutch Indies in modern Indonesia. Karafuto lost hence its strategic interest in the profit of Taiwan and the Kurils islands. The Japanese expansion eastwards took an Arctic turn the Imperial forces tried to capture Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian Islands^[131]. The maneuver took place on June 7th, 1942, 6 months into the Pacific War. The Japanese High Command hoped to establish a bridgehead on the American Continent to control Alaska, an important hub for aircrafts between Europe and Asia. The Allied counter-attacked on May 11th, 1943 and succeeded in recapturing the islands from the Japanese Northern Army, whose troops came mainly from Hokkaidō and Karafuto.

As a consequence, the remaining Japanese troops stationed in Kiska were repatriated to the Kuril Islands, more precisely on Matua, Shumshu, Paramushir, Urup and Iturup. The island of Matua (Matsuwa-tō) became especially a pivot in the defensive infrastructure of the Japanese defense system from its Northern frontier, displacing the focus of the defensive strategy even further away from Karafuto^[132]. The most experienced units stationed on Karafuto were transferred to the Kurils, leaving the 88th Division as a replacement, essentially composed of students and reservists. The recruitment of spared groups of the population at this point of the war indicated the later stage of the war after the turning point of Midway Battle of 1942, where shortages and systemic malfunction began to cripple the Japanese war machine. In this context of progressive retreat of the Japanese forces, line after line of defensive, the island of Matua went under intensive engineering^[133]. So to speak, the remnants of the 312th infantry unit transformed the island into a fortress, pretty similar to what could be found in other areas of the Pacific War, where the insular landscape itself became militarized with the installation of bunkers and underground facilities. Concrete and cement played an important role, not frequently mentioned in the scholarship, in the materiality of those infrastructures^[134]. One part of that cement originated probably from Karafuto, having a cement producing plant that furnished raw material to the fortification works in Karafuto and in the Chijima Islands.

Even though struck at the very end of the war, the resources and the industries of Karafuto experienced a decline with the outbreak of the Pacific War. This sharp drop was due to multiple reasons, but the main explanation was linked to the harsh backlash of military adventurism itself. The economic machinery alimenting the war effort reached its limits and entered in contradiction with other imperatives of the conflict. An example of the productive system falling apart was found in the fishing industry. The floats based in Karafuto were vital in alimenting the Japanese markets in cold water species and whale products. With the deteriorating conditions of combat, the High Command recruited the fishing boats for coastal defense and mostly for shipping around the different battle grounds. Another problem plagued the local industries: Karafuto and the Japanese Empire in general relied heavily on maritime fret to transport goods and population around its sphere of influence. As the conflict lingered and the supply lines were stretched to the extreme, fuel and security became pressing issues. The merchant marine face both the depletion of their fuel supply and a growing probability to be sunk by the enemy on frequented axes.

The Tsugaru and Sōya straits, despite being primordial pathways for the Northern sector and closely guarded by the Imperial Navy, saw several boats sunk by American ships and jeopardized the traffic that linked Karafuto and the Kurils to the rest of the home islands. The strategic problem for Karafuto consisted then in its limited food autonomy and depended on Hokkaidō and Honshū for soybeans and rice. The irregularity of the fret and the shortage in strategic supplies hampered the productivity of the island in return because the exports could leave Karafuto anymore. Furthermore, the peripheral situation of Karafuto didn’t aid either for the fact the State focused more on China and Southeast Asia than the North, suffering from the competitions with other production hubs, such Manchurian coal and Korean wood or Taiwanese sugar.

The shift administrative change of status from naichi to gaichi in 1943 testified only of the dire situation and was all in all a formality. It translated in administrative terms the circumstance that the territory was thoroughly assimilated to the home islands or that the desperate Imperial power tried to affirm its grip on an Empire on the verge of collapse^[135]. Karafuto depended now on the Ministry of Interior and saw its governor lose its autonomy in favor of a reinforced central governmental control. It made part manifestly of a larger scheme to assimilate the colonized populations to the Japanese people to exert a further control on local societies and their resources. With the majority of the population being native Japanese, the population lost a part of a privileged position guaranteed by the frontier position of the former colony. As Amano underlined, Karafuto was considered as an average prefecture were less regarded then other territories at the fringes of the Empire where the government spent the most efforts^[136].

The conjecture further deteriorated in 1944 with the beginning of the fire bombings by the Allied forces on the major towns of Japan, diminishing severely the productive capacity of the home islands. The military authorities brought to compensate for the shortage of labor about 9 '000 miners to work in the coal mines of the prefecture, from Japan and Korea. Labor conditions were horrendous at the level of what could be imagined from the urgency of the situation. The forced labor meant longer workers hours, with higher productive coercion and with poor security and food. The combination of hunger, exhaustion and disease provoked the death of workers, though the number was unknown, but with a heavier toll for Korean workers due to the racial prejudice put upon laborers to justify the colonial domination of the Japanese^[137].

3.3 The Fall of Karafuto

On August 9th, 1945, the Red Army declared war on Japan and unleashed a swift invasion of the Japanese positions on mainland Asia and Sakhalin. The Japanese debacle allowed the Russian troops to rapidly occupy Northern China and the island. The attack of Karafuto, adopting the Blitzkrieg strategy, attacked from three angles: from North Sakhalin, from the ports of Maoka and Ōdomari^[138]. Even after the capitulation of Japan, the fighting didn’t end until the 18th of August with the fall of Toyohara and the annihilation of the last pockets of resistance against the invaders. At a smaller scale of what Manchukuo endured, the fights in Karafuto saw a lot of bitter battles and horrors. On one hand, the Soviets wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and to retaliate the different humiliations endured by Russians; on the other hand, Japanese defenders fought for their last stand. Most of fights ended in close combat in the retrenched positions held by the Imperial Army^[139]. The obstination of certain pockets despite the surrender of Japan led to the bombardment of towns such as Maoka, Ōdomari and Toyohara, while the troops stationed in Karafuto opted for a scorched earth tactic, leaving the infrastructures of former colony in shambles to a great extent.

The civilian population evacuated the island in a hurry and fled the Soviet forces as they swiped south towards Toyohara. The war refugees sought two options, either to fly to catch a boat to the home islands, or to stay in Karafuto under the umbrella of the main strongholds of the Toyohara Plain. As the situation deteriorated, more and more civilians tried desperately to join the home islands by all means possible. The remaining authorities organized the evacuation by giving priority to the women, elderly and children while men in age of fighting were retained for the defense of the island. Various scenes of turmoil could be seen as people competed to the scarce means of escape as the net tightened around the ports in the Aniwa Bay^[140]. Within 10 days of combat, Karafuto was captured along with the Kurils and supported a human toll of at least 3 '000 people and heavy material destruction wrought in a few days.

The role played by infrastructures was paradoxical because of its cost-, resource- and labor-intensive nature. On one hand, the infrastructures with military purpose played a significant part in the defense of the island during the Russian assault of Karafuto. The different retrenched positions made it difficult to control the territory without an exhausting capture campaign of each bottleneck. On the other side, the whole economy and society of Karafuto reposed during the wartime period on an increasingly dysfunctional system. Mining, transports and industrial infrastructures had to operate under aggravating conditions, skilled operators were drafted to the military while the shortage in raw materials such as foodstuff or other critical technical materials^[141]. These dire circumstances brought the underlying structures of the karafutoan society to its knees. In fact, the Soviet campaign gave the final blow to a deficient economy, but in a relatively pristine state.

Under the Soviet administration and until the suppression of the legal existence of Karafuto, the former colony experienced a profound restructuration, as much as from the social and economic point of view. The subsequent Soviet industrial growth during the postwar period could draw partially its success from a Japanese legacy, with all respect due to the colossal recovery work and further extension of the economic apparatus made by the Russians.

Manifestly one of the most drastic changes was the ethnic makeup of the Southern half of Sakhalin. The predominantly Japanese population was evacuated to the home islands, even after the defeat, under the double aim of completing the wishes of the Japanese population and to russify and “sovietize” this part of the island^[142]. The major part of the arriving population brought by the central government consisted in Ukrainians and Belarussians and inhabitants of the Western Russia, where war made the most damages, fled the deplorable living conditions^[143]. The integration of Karafuto to the Soviet Empire was facilitated by the rapid and relatively less brutal compared to the European theater of war, even though Stalin considered the matter personally as a revenge for the defeat of 1905. The new Soviet administration allowed the Japanese local administration and social institutions to be temporarily maintained before their dismantlement. Though the blending in the new Soviet system seemed rather peaceful, the Japanese population was closely monitored as stressed by Urbansky and Barop in their article^[144]. Social institutions such as the tonarigumi (neighborhood associations) were phagocyted by the Soviet authorities to assert a form of control from the top to bottom.

The provisory nature of the immediate postwar regime in former Karafuto would implement the Soviet society “from scratch” step by step. The scales of the political measures shrank from large scale to processes with smaller range of action. Land reforms and the abolition of the market economy in favor of a state-planned economy are good examples of the policies taken by the government. The Japanese and the Soviet workers received the same salaries, with a coexistence of the ruble and the yen as equal-value currencies. Japanese was maintained temporarily as an official language as part of the strategy to keep the Japanese population on the island^[145].

Despite the efforts to integrate the Japanese population to the larger Soviet imperium by different tools, the significant number of the remainder population tried to flee to the mainland before the beginning of the repatriations in 1946. The prefecture of Karafuto was integrated into the larger Soviet ensemble under the oblast of Sakhalin in February of the same year, consecrating the reunification of the halves of the island under the same Red Flag. The final step in the larger process of assimilation the rest of the USSR revealed to be the abolition of the Karafuto prefecture as an administrative entity on June 1st, 1949, turning for good the page of the Japanese colonization of the island. The negotiation of peace began in San Francisco and the subsequent treaty was signed in 1951. The Treaty of San Francisco marked the end of all territorial control of Japan over the territories outside of the home islands, though it never signed a peace treaty with the USSR or Russia^[146]. The remaining contentious point of the Kurils islands, mostly Habomai and Etorofu, a territory transformed as a defense territory in a very different context. During the Cold War, the island conserved its title of gateway territory, reinforcing the forbidden and militarized side of the island.

Despite the Japanese occupiers leaving the island, what stayed were the infrastructures. The most enduring legacy of the Karafuto-era consisted in the architectural structures and the engineered environments on which Soviet-era Russia developed subsequent operations to further develop industrial and extractive work on Sakhalin. The battle for Sakhalin and the Kurils did little damage to the overall infrastructures apart from several damaged buildings and retrenched positions. Such a configuration benefited greatly to the Soviet local government and industrial enterprises of the existing infrastructures to further expand the productive apparatus and consequently the human impact on the island’s ecosystems^[147].

The timber, coal and oil industries stayed the most important industries of the postwar period, the coal reserves of Sakhalin are estimated to reach 2 billion tons and gas reserves are said amongst the biggest in Asia, whose products are exported to inside the Soviet economic exchange network but also to the rest of the globe, mostly Asia with pulp, paper, timber and coal. Beyond the natural resource extraction sector, the manufacturing sector diversified during this period as well. The influx of refugees and job seekers during the postwar period allowed the emergence of light or heavy industries, notably cement, distilleries, breweries, food processing plants and refineries. The economic landscape of the postwar Soviet era is eloquent in the legacy left by Japanese colonization, even though traces of that past had been altered by the Soviet and Russian governments^[148]. We can remark for example a discrepancy between the North where most of the natural resources are found whereas the South is mainly dedicated to the industrial activities, where we find the capital Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and the strategic port of Kholmsk. Besides the handy location of both cities and the protection offered by the Aniwa Bay, the Japanese infrastructural legacy could be felt by the density of the preexisting fabric that allowed Sakhalin oblast’s government to invest less for a greater output. The population increased sixfold during the postwar years, posing a momentary problem for housing and the multiplication of housing to give an accommodation to every new resident on the island. One mustn’t forget the credit as well the Soviet-era efforts deserve, with the connection by train of the island from North to South and the creation of a road network, at least rudimentary on the whole of Sakhalin. Great efforts were made too for afforestation and restoration of ecosystems stricken by overexploitation, allowed by a central planning over a state laissez-faire policy leading to an anarchical exploitation of the timber resources^[149]. The environmental impact was mixed since the island wasn’t still independent for its alimentary security and the multiplication of human activities put a greater pressure on the island’s biosystems with higher fragmentation, exploitation and pollution.

As we could see, infrastructures built by the Japanese colonizers had multiple purposes, mostly laying the physical pillars necessary to an efficient control of the territory, mostly when the territory in question had the reputation of an unforgiving milieu which occupied a strategic position as the keep for the building Empire on its fringes. Military infrastructures had a direct effect on strengthening the grip of the State on Karafuto and by materializing the border between two empires. We could even risk to formulate the conclusion that the civil infrastructures had a more crucial role in the perennity of the colony and in the fulfillment of its mission. With the presence of infrastructures, the colonizers modified the environment to make it suitable to their needs, as stressed by William Cronon^[150]. It made possible the complete array of activities to maintain a viable industrial advanced post of Japan in the region. For further reflections, the possible pathways would be to explore the impact of infrastructures in other parts of the Empires or with the home islands themselves, since they served as a model to develop the different territorial acquisitions of Japan.

Primary literature

Anonymous, “The Preparation of the Post-war and the Fishing industry (Part 1-8): the Speech of the Fishery Bureau Director Tsurumi” (Sengo no junbi to suisangyō (1-8): Tsurumi suisan kyokuchō kōen), in: Karafuto Daily, Vol. 3, Num. 40, 12.08.1912, ID-0100294025, Kobe University Newspaper Clippings Collection.

Anton Chekhov, The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin (trans. Luba and Michael Terpak), Washington Square Press Inc., New York, 1967.

Foreign Economic Administration, Enemy Branch, Japanese Fishing Industry, September 1945, Library of Congress, R-28-47.

Karafuto governorate, The Karafuto Governorate’s Establishment 30th anniversary (Karafuto-chō bōsei sanjū-nen shi), 1936, Karafuto Agency, Toyohara.

US Department of Agriculture, Pulp and Paper Industry in Japan. February 1947, Madison, University of Wisconsin, 1947, Oregon State University.


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