The history of Karafuto has been explored several times, but the angle of environmental history is fairly new, at least in the English literature. The main bulk of the historiographic production about the history of Sakhalin as an entity is either in Japanese or Russian. Important works where made by Tessa Morris-Suzuki^[1] and another opus edited by Philip Seaton and Svetlana Paichadze^[2], or Steven Irvings^[3] are to mention. The contributions presented here are mostly treating the island’s past by the angle of identity, memory or labor history. The shifting colonial status of the territory throughout the Japanese Empire and being situated at the border of Russia/ Soviet Union represented an interesting case study for historians. James Howell^[4] and William I. Tsutsui^[5] studied Karafuto as well, but in a larger environmental context of the fishing industry in Modern Japan.

One figure, among others tends to be cited and stands still as a referential historian about the region’s past: John J. Stephan^[6], honorary professor in Manoa University, Hawai’i. The historian wrote several works on Russia, Japan and the United States and their mutual relationships. He is better known as the author of a general history of Sakhalin island, published in 1971. The book is to this day the only general history and the most complete volume in Western language to treat the turbulent case of Karafuto/Sakhalin. The strength of his study was to shift his focus as an island as a whole, instead of adopting a narrower view where one side only would prevail. It permits us to appreciate the chronology of Sakhalin island with a panoramic view and to grasp the parallels of development between both sides of the 50th parallel. Even though his investigation could be considered a little outdated, the quality of the analysis stood the test of time. However, the book left a few points unanswered for the 1905-45 period. The main drawback of his approach is to concentrate extensively on economic and geopolitical history, letting aside social or cultural matters, playing an important role in creating a vanguard post on the Northern fringe of the Empire. The article argues by taking an environmental approach to further understand the nature of the Japanese presence of Sakhalin.

John J. Stephen wrote a few years later another book on the Kurils islands, widening the vantage point what are known in Japan as the Northern Territories (hoppō chihō)^[7]. The advantage to consider the Chijima archipelago as a territory of their own was to focus on the trajectory of those and to somehow emancipate the role these islands played in the region’s history. One could rightfully argue that the separation is artificial, but it gives the importance the Kurils bear in the northward expansion of Japan without placing them in the footnotes of a bigger history. The archipelago is often considered in the literature as a buffer territory between Russia and Japan, belittling the history of the local society and the role it played in the Ainu world between Hokkaidō and Kamchatka.

The island is situated at the confluence of several networks and territorial entities, explaining partially its tumultuous and particular trajectory. Being a nod of the Okhotsk sea, the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Japan, Sakhalin is at the center of several power struggles between three spheres of influence that are Russia, Japan and China. The geopolitical conundrum of the northern islands or Hokkaidō and Sakhalin is further put by the island’s proximity with the continent, the Amur river, and with the Japanese archipelago. Sakhalin shares other similarities to other territories conquered by Japan during the modern period: it was considered by different powers as terra nullius, a peripheral territory that wasn’t defined as strategic until becoming a frontier territory under Japanese control (Hokkaidō, Manchuria or Taiwan). Noemi Godefroy’s work can make us understand how much the territory was important in the island during the Premodern period in Japan (1600-1867) and beyond^[8].

In substance, the island’s historical course and of its inhabitants reflects this pivotal status from the socio-geo-cultural perspective. This explains well why Tessa Morris-Suzuki advocated for an anti-area studies that would reverse the preconceived ideas we have about a given area of study by getting rid and proposing a problem-focused history, where a certain thesis or problematic would shape the temporal and geographical extent of one’s research^[9]. The impact of the strategic position was mostly relevant for the modern period of the island’s past. During the last two centuries, the territory that was primarily inhabited by indigenous populations of the region were progressively implicated in a power struggle between two imperial entities who were tsarist Russia and Tokugawa Japan. The indigenous populations composed of Nivkhs, Uiltas and Ainus people would face several relocations and episodes of forced integration to a colonial regime where the settlers outnumbered the aboriginal populations. Several changes of hands meant as well for the insular population as well for the newly settled population too, episodes of relocation and forced expatriation outside of Sakhalin. Forced assimilation, the perturbation of the traditional societies and diseases dealt ravages to indigenous societies until their ultimate dilution or destruction into a larger settler population. One of the victims of the violence stemming from the colonial competition were the Kuril Ainus, whose last member died in 1876^[10].

With the change of affiliation came along repercussions on the culture and the material underpinnings of these cultures. One of these most impressive changes occurred with the Japanese conquest of Sakhalin after the victory of Japan against Russia during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5. The southern half of Sakhalin, named Karafuto in Japanese. In order to fortify the frontier and to exploit the resources of the island at its best, the military, then civil colonial government decided to develop the island through several extractive operations. This led to a rapid and dense reinforcement of the Japanese presence in the southern half of the island during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, the most important conflict of the Meiji era. Moreover, the colonization paired with a strong transformation of the island’s environment by the modification of the landscape because of a search for rentability and productivity.

The case of Taiwan is worth a comparison. Being the second formal territory to be colonized, the island formerly called Formosa (“the beautiful one” in Latin) has been the object of a similar quest for control through infrastructures and rentability. The Japanese colonial government tried to “develop” the island by improving its road network and by installing railways for a better access to its potential^[12]. The potential in question was mostly agricultural and was conceived as the cash crop colony, a rice granary and other raw tropical crops such as santal wood, sugar cane and camphor. Railways and waterways were crucial as well to unlock the mountainous interior of the island, where massive timber reserves and the remnants of Formosan resistance were located. The model that inspired the colonizers was the Dutch West Indies (modern Indonesia), where the archipelago was administered pretty much as a large stock of raw materials to extract to fuel the industrial economy of the metropolis (e.g. coal, rubber and spices). The climate held however Taiwan and Sakhalin apart: the subarctic climate posed different challenges and responses to the administrators. Instead of fighting tropical disease, the colonists had to face the climate and the inhospitality of the place. In this regard, the case of Hokkaidō became an important model for the development of Karafuto.

The central question of this article is to investigate the environmental past of Karafuto during the Japanese colonial period (1905-1949) and to see how its status as a frontier colony influenced its trajectory. In other words, how did Japanese colonization influence the fate of the southern half of Sakhalin, through the lenses of infrastructural development? Epistemologically speaking, the main weakness of the present argument is the impossibility of access to the records left by the local administration, located nowadays in the oblast archives of Sakhalin in the island’s capital, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk (former Toyohara). Being not digitized and for geopolitical reasons, a key-piece of the corpus is missing. To cope with such an issue, we will have to consider this study as partial and comforting some zones of uncertainty. The sources will be mainly in Japanese and found in Japanese archival depositories while maintaining a vigilant eye to the biases created by the distance separating the mainland from Karafuto. The second major limit to this study is the language: the relative absence of sources in Russian, due to the author’s non-mastery of Russian, leads us to consider solely the southern part of Sakhalin meanwhile omitting the northern half. To partially mitigate the problem, we will have no choice but to base our observations with the existing literature on the island’s northern half and its history.

What is meant by infrastructures? Infrastructures, from the point of view of architecture and engineering, refers to an artifact or construction of variable shape and size whose goal is to sustain another human work of art or an activity. We tend to think of infrastructure as an underlying piece of a larger ensemble, the supra-structure; so to speak its “plumbing” or as something placed underneath, serving of foundations. From another perspective, we might consider infrastructure as a physical alteration of an environment which sustains a more global endeavor. In our case, the Japanese as well as the many others altered their environment, or engineered it to suit their colonial and imperial ambitions. The modification of the environment and its influence would in return satisfy other needs and compel the colonizers to adapt to the side effects of those very changes. For instance, the Japanese engaged in profound modifications of the island’s landscapes and environment through the locus of infrastructures.

Infrastructures are not inherently serving a colonial purpose, but the case of the Japanese Empire and other imperial ensembles used weaponized infrastructures to implement a stronger control of the territory they sought to dominate. The number and the complexity of the infrastructures deployed in a territory were a barometer to measure the prosperity and the level of civilization of their own societies and the ones they interacted with. The construction of infrastructures would be considered as an act of progress, or the implantation of civilization in a territory where it lacked, regularly shown as a gift from the colonizers to their subjects.

1.1 Conquering the border

Even before the Russo-Japanese War, Sakhalin and the Kurils islands (Chijima rettō) were disputed territories, at the expense of the native populations. Already during the 18^[th] century, Japanese and Russians explored the Okhotsk Sea area in order to assert their sovereignty over the territories and their populations. For tsarist Russia, the southward expansion had the objective to establish a permanent port where the sea didn’t freeze during the winter, opposingly to the Baltic Sea. On the other end, the Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1868) saw the Russian advance as a foreign incursion threatening its territorial integrity. The cartographic mission of Mamiya Rinzō, sent by the Shogunate, had the purpose to investigate whether Sakhalin was connected to the Hokkaidō (Ezochi or Ezo). More importantly, his mission was to show at the time the control of Japan over the northern territories and to define the extent of the realm.

A first major change occurred with the arrival of the Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854, forcing the Tokugawa shogunate to open to trade with the United States, France, Great Britain, Prussia and Russia through the use of Unequal Treaties, putting Japan in the weaker diplomatic position. So, the Treaty of Shimoda was signed with Russia in 1855 and put a first formal agreement on the fate of the concerned territories in the Okhotsk Sea area. Japan and Russia would administer together the island of Sakhalin and the Kurils islands. The treaty of Shimoda marked the beginning of a stronger Japanese presence on the island, seen as a prolongation of Hokkaidō. However, the Treaty of Saint-Petersburg modified the situation in 1875 by conceding control of the island to the Russian Empire and the Kuril archipelago to the Meiji state. During this period of time between 1875 and 1905, the island was seen from Saint-Petersburg as an extremely remote territory, situated at the edges of its realm and bearing little importance to Russian interests, who turned its attention to Manchuria. Its remoteness explained the cultural views of the territory in the minds of the era, an island where Nature was pristine but dangerous and where populations fought against to survive. Due to its hostile image, Sakhalin became a penitentiary colony whose biggest port and towns were Aleksandrovsk (Akō) and Korsakov (Ōtomari). The famous Russian writer Anton Chekhov spent more than six months on Sakhalin and described the rude but improving living conditions of the island. “I [Chekhov] did not suffer hunger or any inconvenience during my travels round Sakhalin. I had read that supposedly the agronomist Mitsul suffered terrible privations while surveying the island and was even forced to eat his dog. Since then the situation has changed considerably. Your present-day agronomist rides on good roads, and even in the very poorest settlements there are guardhouses, or so-called quarters, where a warm lodging, a samovar [brass teapot] and a bed can always be found”^[13]. The Kurils interested more the burgeoning Japanese Empire, hence it could assure an extended fishing grounds in an area rich in halieutic resources, a way for Japan to expand its pelagic empire.

The tensions between Japan and tsarist Russia over control of Korea and Manchuria explained the war that broke out in 1904. The Russo-Japanese War (Nichi-rō sensō) could be considered as a premise of World War I, an example of a total and industrial war between two powerful armies. The parallel gains even more sense if we consider the morphology of the conflict: several thousand men engaged in a maneuver war which got stuck into a conflict of position, in trenches where soldiers would sustain significant casualties to secure modest victories (the battles of the 203 Hill for example). The geographic configuration of the conflict was regional and concerned Sakhalin to a limited extent, being peripheric to the most important fronts situated on the mainland, at the frontier of Manchuria and Korea. Why did the Japanese invade the island then? In a period of heightened nationalism, the ideological reason was to retake from the enemy in a land deemed Japanese since the end of the Edo period. Moreover, the island bore a strategic importance as a buffer zone between Japan and Russia. Even before the invasion, Sakhalin had a critical importance on the regional level for the security of the home islands.

The invasion encountered little resistance from the Russian garrison stationed in Sakhalin (14 '000 vs. 7280 troops), due to rapid pace and great difference of manpower between both sides; two elements that could explain the poor state of morale among the troops, being at a late stage of the war. The entirety of the island territory was controlled in the span of two months, shortly after the decisive victory of Japan over Russia at the Battle of Tsushima, May 1905. The occupation was completed in July 1905. The following Treaty of Portsmouth would give Japan the southern half of Sakhalin, also known as Karafuto. The Russian settlers or ex-convicts could choose whether to stay or to leave the island. A few remained comprehensively on the island since they pretty much considered it as a prison, while most of the former convicts fled to the continent for Siberia. The news provoked a wave of panic in the Far East due to the perceived nature of the islanders. Those who stayed on the Japanese side of Sakhalin progressively blended to the local Japanese society who were revealed to be quite cosmopolitan, with groups of Russians, Polishes, Indigenous nations, Koreans or Chinese blended in a vast Japanese majority.

Ethnicity	Households	Individuals
Japanese	59’237	304’995
Koreans	1’233	5’878
Russians	44	193
Ainus	358	1’512
Total	61’009	313’130

The colonial government was established in 1907, of military nature. The first two years of the colonization were dedicated to the establishment of the Japanese presence on the island and the reinforcement of its positions. The first regional capital was based in the city of Ōdomari or Korsakov in the Aniwa Bay, in front of the city of Wakkanai on Hokkaidō island, the placement was strategic because the port of Ōdomari was with Maoka the most important points to take control of the coast in the early days of the colonization. It allowed among other advantages to safely bring troops and material from the home islands. It is only after the establishment of a basic state apparatus that the regional capital was transferred to the settlement of Vladimirovka, renamed for the occasion Toyohara or prosperous fields in 1907. The colonial capital was actually under civil administration since its establishment, even though the army kept a strong presence for obvious reasons during the whole of the island’s colonization.

In order to maximize the efficiency of the seizing of the territory and the following transition to a civil administration, the military government applied a method familiar to other colonial powers and even more in the nascent empire. The army invades and occupies the territory before establishing a strong control of the zone, to prevent any strife or rebellion from happening. If so, the insurrections are brutally repressed until the situation is settled. In the meantime, different units of the occupation army split up to form the core of the future government. In the case of Karafuto, the colonization forces split into three sections that took control of the territory in three circumscriptions in three phases. The circumscriptions were actually the future subprefectures of the civil administration of Karafuto, each under the control of a local military bureau: Toyohara, Ōdomari and Maoka. The first phase stretched from 1905 to the summer of 1906. Each region was under the control of a lieutenant commander (shōsa), in charge of a unit. This phase was critical as well because it was during this period that the plan of Toyohara was laid out, whose inspiration was taken from Chicago. When compared, one may emit doubts about the link between both cities, being much more plausible to look at Sapporo city’s plan for a more plausible source of inspiration. Nevertheless, the American Midwest served as a model for development in the northern regions of the archipelago. Another grand achievement of this initial phase was the preparation of a fishing float and the welcoming of settler boats already coming to the island.

The second phase was the semi-transition to a civil government during July and August 1906. The transfer of power bore great significance due to the establishment of infrastructure whose bases were laid during this period. The treaty of Portsmouth, signed in September 1906, solidified the Japanese claims and the de facto situation on the southern half of the island, creating a precarious balance that would remain for the next forty years. The semi-civil government continued the endeavor of the military colonial state by reinforcing the nascent bureaucratic apparatus with the opening of provincial bureaus under the authority of the three main regional branches of Toyohara, Maoka and Ōdomari. The administration would take under strict control the resources of the island (fur, oil, woods, coal and game) while consolidating communications such as railroad network, road network and telecommunications.

The third and final phase spanned from July 1906 to March 1907, which was characterized by the surveys for resources at the scale of the island, with a double aim. The first aim would be to define the extractive potential of the island, suspected to be rich mostly for its fishing grounds and its forests. The second aim was to map out the island precisely in order to practically master the interior of the island, which was still fairly unexplored at the time. Moreover, the surveys had for purpose the localization of the best spots for settlements and a perennial colonization. The same endeavor has been done in Taiwan and will be done in the first years of the colonization of Korea. The military government would definitely end in April 1908 for a prefectural government.

1.2 North Sakhalin after 1905

On the Russian side, the Treaty of Portsmouth and the subsequent loss of the island led to the end of the convict and penal colony system. Having now a terrestrial frontier with Japan, Russia regarded the island no more as a desolate margin of the Empire but became a territory with high importance and a critical source of tensions for both sides. The penal colony system showed its limits because of the poor economic results brought by this method. The governor of Sakhalin, Leonid Grigoriev, unsuccessfully tried to change the colonization and development strategy by establishing free settlers and their family to Sakhalin. To attract new colonists, the local government appealed to the Russian public by giving a large plot of land to farming families and a subsidy to compensate for the harsh living conditions and the remoteness of the island. Nevertheless, the appeal campaign for free settlers failed in its mission due to the tenacious bad reputation of the island, considered remote, cold and hostile by the civil population.

During the last years of the Tsarist regime, the economy continued to focus on fishing and forestry, agriculture could thrive well in the cold weather of Northern Sakhalin. The mining sector was beginning slowly to take off but with little success due to a lack of estimations and of capital, until British and American investors, notably Sinclair Oil Company, laid her eyes upon the coal and fields of northern Sakhalin. Japanese investors were not far behind once the poverty in oil of Karafuto’s underground had been known. The Japanese oil companies and the Navy were determined to keep the lion’s share of the oil and coal fields once they succeeded in obtaining the leasehold they sought.

The following years, the process of state building continued with the main mission to organize the production and the reinforcement of its gestion. Two decrees in March and April 1908 would lead to the creation of two departments supervised by the Ministry of the Interior, Unit One devoted to administrative matters and Unit two in charge of colonization, plus the public works. With the rapid augmentation of the population, a third department was opened, in charge of police forces and urban planning in 1910. In 1911, the gestion of the colony was transferred from the Ministry of the Interior to the Office of the Prime Minister.

Beyond the institutional perspective, the island experienced its first population boom with the multiplication of the population by five in a sequence of five years between 1907 and 1912 (2065 to 10 '059 households). Most of the immigration concentrated in urban centers inherited from the Russian era, namely the local capitals of the territory, something which we would observe in other colonies. The Japanese population rapidly overtook the Russian population, who for the most fled to the Northern half of Sakhalin, even the Aborigine population composed a demographic minority on their soil after their obliteration by plagues brought by colonizers (smallpox and cholera). Among the new settlers, we could find for the most part a population coming from the Tōhoku region or Northern Honshū. Historically, the bulk of the settler population establishing themselves in Hokkaidō and Karafuto was coming from this area for economic reasons, mostly poor farmers and fishermen trying to find a better life in the nearest territory. A sharp decline of herring stocks offshore of Tōhoku and Hokkaidō ushered such migrations, based on the research of David Howell^[18] on the history of Japanese fishing. Such migrations to an outside territory was even encouraged by the central government, seeing this emigration to Karafuto as an opportunity to ease the domestic pressure from social point of view, during an age of rapid demographic growth brought by the improvement of the general living standards throughout the Meiji era.

Beyond their provenance, who were those migrants? Based on the statistics of the population made by the Karafuto Agency in 1936, the typical migrant was a Japanese man coming from Northern Japan and aged between 20 and 30 years. This fairly young and masculine population would work mainly in sectors renamed in the island’s economy: fishing, timber/paper and mining industry, without mentioning the retailing sector. Based on the works of Steven Irvings^[19], the attractivity of Karafuto was partly due to its salaries more than living conditions. The workers would be recruited by the different recruitment agencies, promoting high salaries and better working conditions that we would find elsewhere in Japan. Such a demographic state would be a curse and a blessing for the gateway status of Karafuto. Despite having a vigorous and dynamic population being in age for warfare, the lack of balance in the gender ratio would hamper the perennity of the colony. Karafuto would heavily rely on its migratory labor over a permanent settler population. The situation improved through time with the rapid augmentation of the female population in the following years, mostly in the beginning of the Taishō era. Even with the augmentation of the female population due mostly to familial settlement, the gender balance will never be equal by 10 percent. In this regard, by the time of the Shōwa, the local government succeeded in creating a permanent and growing settlement at the Northern fringe of the empire.

Karafuto stands apart from the rest of the empire by the majority of the population made of Japanese natives. It doesn’t represent the entire ethnic makeup of the population of the island, we must mention for example the significant Korean and Russian population, constituting respectively the same number as the Japanese residents and 5% of the total population. The strong presence of a Korean population, even to this day, is explained by the colonization of the Korean peninsula by Japanese forces in 1910 and its following social consequences. Colonization and the agrarian restructuration of the peninsula led to a loss of lands for a part of Korean farmers, others fleeing poverty to take their chance far from their birthplace. We would detail later the subsequent augmentation of the Korean diaspora and their eventual stay on the island after the downfall of the Japanese empire. As mentioned by Tessa Morris Suzuki^[20], even working within the same social conditions, the stigma of imperialism would persist on the island. Outnumbered by far, the indigenous population (Gilyak, Karafuto Ainu and Nivkh) would count for 0.5 to 2% of the total population, mostly confined to the Northern part of the territory or to the rural settlements.

In this regard, the colony of Karafuto was one of the best integrated colonies of the imperium, whose process of integration was progressive during the short period of time where it was colonized. Based on the book directed by Ramon Myers^[21], one of the greatest obstacles in the history of the Japanese Empire was the failure of the integration of the multiethnic component of the colonial societies. In opposition to the British imperial model who allowed more flexibility when it came to governance, the Japanese model had overall a more rigid system that gave scarce space for maneuver to the autochthone populations. The tension between the promise of civilizing subjugated populations through colonization, ipso facto their integration into the Japanese core, while the ethnic definition of the Japanese national identity prevents the process from happening efficiently. However, contrary to Korea or Taiwan where the population was mainly indigenous, the Japanese population was the most important ethnic group on Karafuto. Such a social makeup allowed a far better integration to the imperium, culminating by its status of prefecture (Karafuto-ken). Nevertheless, its peripheric position at the crossroads of Japan, Russia and China and its environment created the conditions for the emergence of a local identity.

1.3 Influence from the Hokkaido Experience

The position of the island in the imperial space produced a local governance as well adapted to the context in which the Karafuto Agency ruled. It drew inspiration from different sources, both from inner and outer influences. For historical reasons, the experience of Hokkaidō (former Ezo island) played a strong influence in the colonial development (kaitaku, kaihatsu) found on Karafuto. Initially, the Hokkaidō Colonization Bureau (Hokkaidō Kaitakushi) deployed its authority on both islands, before the Treaty of St-Petersburg of 1875, setting Sakhalin in the Russian sphere of influence. The role of the governmental organization was to reinforce the Japanese presence and control on Hokkaidō in case of Russian invasion before shifting to socio-economic reasons. The island was seen as terra nullius that had to be filled and converted to civilization by settling and agricultural development. The Meiji government considered it as a reliable source of raw materials to ensure the well-being of the country and as an outlet to demographic pressure.

By introducing new agricultural species and techniques based on a military workforce (tondenhei) and by establishing extractive or industrial operations, the Hokkaidō Colonization Bureau and the Prefectural Government of Hokkaidō tried to emulate the industrial development happening at the same time on the main island22. The same strategy will be applied elsewhere in the Japanese colonial empire, with local adaptations depending on the function of the colony. For example, Korea served mainly as the major supplier of rice along with Taiwan for Japan during the period. From this perspective, Karafuto seemed to be no different and followed a similar pattern, where it was conquered first for strategic purposes and then underwent a strong economic development. Mainly dedicated to an export market based on resources, Sakhalin’s southern half exported a slightly different palette than Hokkaidō. Unable to grow rice due to the subarctic climate, which represented the core element of the Japanese national identity along with soy, the local farmers turned then to crops brought by American foreign experts (mostly agronomists) such as sugar beets, barley, rye among others. Until the end of the Pacific War, Karafuto was renowned for its paper and its wood pulp. Apart from those, both islands had similar exported goods and shared similar trajectories too. Karafuto’s experience was in fact the prolongation of Hokkaidō’s own, posing the foundations for what we can observe in Karafuto.

Beyond the American influence, we may cite a Russian influence and a European influence. We shouldn’t forget about the presence of Chinese experts in Hokkaidō’s development as well, though little is known about their contribution to the island's colonization model. Beyond the realm of agronomics, where we could find 11 Europeans on 18 experts, the culprit of the European influence could be found in the mining industry and in the machinery used for the extraction of ore or coal. The Russian influence had to be found in more discrete corners of the colonization of both islands. We might declare that the Russian influence was heavier on Karafuto for obvious reasons and represented a continuity with Japan’s colonial management. Ann B. Irish23 evocated in her work a trace of it in the inner architecture of settler dwellings in the form of a central stove that could be found at the center of the main room. Another example of the Russian heritage in the region’s colonization could be seen in the urban grid of the islands or the use of sheep as a livestock animal suited for the region. The lifestyle of Karafuto’s settlers was in fact a blend of their home culture and of local influences, both Russian and indigenous. Existing industries during the Tsarist period, like fisheries or kelp cultivation, were retaken and upscaled to suit the needs of the conquerors. Finally, we could see clearly traces of Russian architecture in the urban areas, indicating the lasting impact of 40 years of Russian presence in the area. The heritage of the indigenous cultures in the local culture was erased by the Japanese colonists besides various toponyms of the area. In the local colonial culture, traces could be found in the fishing knowledge of the locals and the stealing of the indigenous experience on Karafuto.

From the environmental perspective, the transfer of Karafuto under Japanese control after the treaty of Portsmouth would signal a much greater impact on the biosystem of the island. The extractive orientation of Karafuto’s economy defines the type of impact we would find throughout the short history of the island’s colonization. In the long run, the extraction of primary resources translated into the depletion of the land and marine ecosystems and by the transformation of the major parts of the island through engineering of its landscapes.

Naturally, the human impact of colonization was already present during the Russian period, but the status and function of the island would shift and with it the trajectory of its environment. The non-strategic status of Sakhalin, situated at the ultimate periphery of the Russian empire, would keep the presence of colonizers and settlers relatively modest compared to later occupiers. Another dimension is the dynamic of those changes, spread over a span of forty years. The rhythm of all these modifications didn’t occur evenly and encountered multiple accelerations through time.

The splitting of the island between two empires would see a physical manifestation as well, resembling dramatically the case of North Korea and South Korea or Germany during the Cold War. The frontier shares similar features as those by having no natural borders such as oceans or mountain chains, being a physical expression of a primarily conceptual border, whose existence relied on the modification of the local environment to express a separation that couldn’t be visible. It bears a double status of construct, at the same time by its infrastructural nature and the tools used to justify its establishment. The frontier was cut through the forest cover on a width of 10 meters on the 50^th parallel, as stipulated in the Treaty of Portsmouth. The frontier essentially bisected the larch and birch forest and the mountains of Sakhalin’s center, ignoring geographical features. Several frontier stones established the boundary within the political entities, which would be kept even after the Soviet Revolution. The frontier and the guard houses installed near the line of demarcation will be the elements of a fortification process that will gain momentum on each side over the years^[24].

On both sides of the border, the infrastructures didn’t reach beyond a guard shack and a village where guards lived with their family at the very end of the road leading to Handenzawa. Even though the frontier between the two countries didn’t located on much hotter grounds as the Asian mainland, the situation remained tense until the outbreak of the Russian civil war and the invasion of North Sakhalin by Japan.

The years following the colonization to the Treaty of Versailles were formative years for laying the bases for the later industrial operations found on Karafuto. The capital and the labor force needed to initiate growth, enough to be independent from the capitals sent from the mainland to the colony. In the first years of Karafuto, the central government subsidized a significant part of the total agency’s budget, compensating the commercial deficit of the settlement. The commercial is showing a loss largely due to the massive imports made to meet the needs of the settlers, mostly staple food like miso, sake and soy sauce and other commodities like tobacco or clothing. The outbreak of war and the participation of Japan in World War I helped greatly the economy of the island, allowing the local economy to ramp up its imports and its industrial output like pretty much the rest of the archipelago. The main cause of the boom in Japanese industrial production was the direct consequence of the ongoing war in Europe, which provoked a dramatic and sudden rewiring of the global trade network. In order to supply their war effort, the belligerents had no choice but to retract their industrial production into the military industry. Vast markets mainly in Asia and in America were then left open for Japan to replace the European offer, mainly in manufactured goods. It was a boon for the Japanese economy, whose domestic and outside markets grew steadily until the end of the war, which marked in return a period of crisis for Japan, mostly by a momentary drop in demand brought by peace.

In Karafuto, the surge in industrial productivity has been expressed by the opening of several factories, mainly in the sector of wood pulp, paper and derivatives of the sea. The opening of new factories concentrated then mainly in urban centers like Toyohara or Maoka, the most salient feature of those factories was the proximity of those industries to the location of their resources. The resulting geography was the relative non-centered shape of the industrial apparatus: the pulp factories were for example concentrated in the North near the border where the logging operations were located in Hontō, whereas canning factories and other industrial operations concentrated in the South in the Aniwa Bay or the Western Coast. Even though the bulk of the industrial distribution was exported to a domestic market, for major consumption markets that were urban centers of Tōkyō, Ōsaka and Kyōto, a part of the industrial production was shipped around the world, when we take a closer look at the Karafuto Nichi Nichi Shimbun (The Karafuto Daily)^[26]. In the final part of the article, we learn that “Japan has been importing so much that it has had to pay 200 million yen to foreign countries every year. But since the outbreak of the war in Europe, it has been exported for 400 million yen more than it did the year before”. The Karafuto Nichi Nichi proves us that the island was entangled as well to a global trade network, with principal destinations being Europe and North America and was profiting of the boom during war years^[27]. The outbreak of World War I strongly restrained the European outlet in favor of a more localized, Pacific-oriented market. In reaction to that shift, the main exporters turned their eyes to mainland Asia, notably China and its Russian ally in need of military equipment^[28].

1.4 Holding on the landscape

From the point of view of landscapes, we could see that those formative and boom years led to the creation of engineered landscapes, mostly in the south of the island where the Japanese influence was the firmest. The creation of ports, roads and railways, which needed a substantial amount of wood, stone and energy for construction, which would be taken from local reserves, easier to extract and use from an operational point of view. For ports, the modification of the coast was different from what we might think from nowadays, for example by an intense artificialization of the coastline. It was mainly the correction of the immediate surroundings of the ports and the installation of portuary infrastructures, like dikes, bridges, dredges, canals and docks. For railroads, the matter was somewhat different because the first rails put by the military forces were brought from the mainland and were in fact transportable. The definitive railways were installed in 1910 and enlarged for civil railroads, requiring important public works by the construction of tunnels and bridges made of wood^[29].

The subsequent growth of urban centers, by its rapidity, necessitated a significant amount of raw materials as well in order to house the settlers coming in number to the island, mostly wood, brick and paper. The later use of cement and concrete would be in use later during the last period of the colonial regime, mainly for administration buildings and for factories. Architecturally speaking, the buildings found in the main establishments of Karafuto were a mix of different styles, which allow historians to distinguish the different stages of urbanization in the scarce traces of the Japanese presence in the today’s cityscape of Sakhalin^[30]. Russian style dwellings, made of timber and with a stocky build would cohabit with Japanese buildings, made of different materials based on the importance of the structure. Wood was preferred to mineral material for regular dwelling, due to its accessibility and low price, while official buildings and state buildings benefited from a more perennial structure made of bricks and stone^[31]. The cities of Karafuto didn’t escape the constitutive problems of Japanese cities of the same period, prone to fires^[32]. The ruder climate of Karafuto would lead as well to the same adaptations we see in Hokkaidō for example, with a better heating system^[33].

The youth of the civil government hindered its ability to efficiently control the extraction of the island resources. The poorly controlled public forests were put under great pressure as the logging operations were left unchecked^[34]. The reckless felling ran so vastly that the forest depletion became rapidly a motive of preoccupation for the Karafuto Agency. Indeed, the forests of Karafuto presented in short year span traces of overexploitation, images of bare hills and eroded rivers became a common vision in the landscapes of the island^[35]. It was however an image that tended to be hidden by the central government’s advertisement of the island, whose claim was precisely the inexhaustibility of Karafuto’s riches. The Karafuto Agency decided to handle the situation in 1912 by introducing a wood cutting restriction and by launching afforestation campaigns. Unfortunately, the forests of the southern half were threatened by fires and disease. As John J. Stephan puts it, fires especially the “bête noire” of the Japanese colonial authorities who tried of whole array of solutions in order to cope with the direct menace to the government’s funds^[36]. Among those, we found special firefighter corps or research stations set up by homeland universities to investigate the causes of the high frequency of fires. The reasons behind the high sensibility of local woods to fire might have been the loss of humidity caused by excessive cutting and the accumulation of dried vegetal material that is ignited by small sparks or cinders. The conclusion that could be drawn is that the combination of overexploitation and disease surely hampered the overall resiliency of the ecosystem and rendered it very prone to such calamity.

1.5 Subarctic conditions

The adaptation to a subarctic and unforgiving climate, similar to the one found in Hokkaidō or to Eastern Siberia would shape the way how the island was occupied by Japanese forces. The population converges to flatlands and coastlines, where the ocean would temper the impact of winter. One could encounter in the midst of winter temperatures that could go below -10 C° with snowfalls until the middle of April or May depending the coast and ocean currents, the Western coast having a colder climate due to ocean currents coming from Kamchatka^[37]. The population was encouraged by the government to change their diet, which was the most important effect of the Karafuto climate, rice wasn’t able to grow and had to be imported to sustain a population struggling to change its culinary habits, an epitome of “japaneseness”. To replace rice, the government and local associations would advise the islanders to eat barley, millet or oat; plants able to withstand the fresher climate of that latitude, “given that Karafuto imported much of its food during the 1930’s”^[38]. Government incentives encouraged moreover the consumption of local livestock, adapted to a rigorous lifestyle, namely sheep and horse. The seafood consumption would adapt as well by consuming larger amounts of local catches, like crab, herrings or salmon, reproducing in the streams of the island^[39].

The functioning of shipping and fishing operations were profoundly shaped by Karafuto’s harsh winter. One of the weak spots of colonial economy was its dependency on imports during the first years of existence and thus its reliance on the safety of maritime routes^[40]. During the winter however, the sea froze between Hokkaidō and Karafuto between December and April. The trade exchange market had in that case been put on a halt for half of the year, isolating the island at a critical period of time. On the logistical level, this peculiar situation demanded a solid control of supplies and the important stocks for foodstuff and fuel. On the opposite side, the export season would be shorter and was consequently intense to compensate the winter pause^[41]. The stocks of merchandise and foodstuff were located in ports in the south of Karafuto, the most vital structure to the livelihood of the colony during its first decade until it attained a greater independence with the obtention of a critical mass for commerce, allowing the local economy to gain some autonomy. We may cite Ōdomari, Maoka and Rutaka.

On the contrary, some industries thrived during the lower season, adapting fairly to a new environment. Logging operations were indeed mostly done during the colder season, even at the heart of winter. The reason behind such a fashion is that the most complicated part of the logging process was the transportation of timber itself to the sawmills. Usually hauled on convoys through river systems, the low temperatures and the ground covered in snow facilitated greatly the transport by sleigh propelled by horsepower. The transport by sleigh on snow or ice was a palliative to rafting, partly due to the freezing of streams during the winter. The augmentation of the logging rate for a paradoxical reason was the product, in fact, of the cumulation of numerous comparative advantage: the reduced amount of energy dedicated thanks to a reduced friction with ice, smaller teams of laborers required for the transport of timber and the seasonal advantage to have benefit from trees being on a biological break. A relatively moist winter allowed a better conservation of fallen trees, preventing the wood from warping too much and the nefarious effects of xylophagous insects. Loggers preferably sought after akamatsu, yezomatsu and birch, trees that would be use later for construction, paper pulp and chemical industry^[42].

Finally, the coldness and remoteness of Karafuto became part of the cultural representation it had in the rest of the Japanese empire. Although being one of the most integrated colonies of the empire on the economic and political level, plus being home to a population mainly composed of mainland settlers, Karafuto was considered still as a hostile and remote environment with thus limited attractiveness^[43]. Promoted by the government as an emigration hub to ease the population issues on the home island, the territory of Karafuto always attracted less people than hoped. It was people mainly already in proximity to Hokkaidō and Karafuto who went there for economical purposes. The relative unsuccessfulness of such promotional politics were the result of the mixed representations the mainland population had about the island. Since its inception, the colony was balancing between opposite positions, on one hand being the most northern frontier of the realm and on the other hand, a peripheral land for the interests of the State^[44]. It is a good example of diverging interests between the different actors of the colonization of Karafuto: the government, the corporations and the population. The government sought majorly to maintain a strong presence in the zone of the Okhotsk Sea by using Karafuto as strategic outpost, while the economic consortia of Japan (the Mitsui Group or Oji Paper Company) saw Sakhalin as profitable investment ground, opposingly the civilians considered Karafuto as a marginal territory where living conditions were not that interesting. The candidates to emigration were rather choosing territories like the Asian mainland or the Americas’ West Coast, mostly after at the dawn the 20th century^[45]. As we will see, the balance shifted mostly depending on the geopolitical climate of Japan in relation with its great neighbors. In virtue of this ambivalent position, Karafuto can be considered as an useful barometer measuring the political storms of the 20^th century.