It is amazing it has taken this long to bring these exhiled Koreans back home:

Korean Park Jung-ja spent the first six decades of her life on wind-swept Sakhalin, the bad breaks of the Cold War making her a citizen of nowhere. Now, she has finally found a home in suburban Seoul.

Park, 68, is one of hundreds of Koreans returning to the country of their ancestors after being stranded on the Russian Far East island since the end of World War Two in 1945.

"I have waited to come here my whole life. My (late) husband said he would even walk across the water from Sakhalin to Korea if he could."

About 150,000 Koreans made their way to Sakhalin in the early 1940s at a time when Japan ruled Korea as a colony and held the lower half of Sakhalin.

The Koreans — some forced into working for the Japanese army and others desperate for jobs — ended up in backbreaking labor at Japanese-run coal mines, lumber yards and pulp mills.

When the war ended, many found their way to Japan or to North Korea, a Soviet ally. About a third, most of them with family in what became South Korea, were left behind, stateless.

Their Japanese nationality was gone, the Soviets did not claim them, and Moscow was not about to send them home to a U.S.-backed state.  [Reuters]

Read the whole thing because it is a very good article about the status of the thousands of Koreans remaining on Sakhalin Island as a legacy of the aftermath of World War II.  It is good to see that the Korean and Japanese governments are actually working together to repatriate the Korean refugees and finance their resettlement in South Korea.  Now if only the Korean government would work this hard to help resettle North Korean refugees into South Korea.