ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Russian-speaking ethnic Japanese and Koreans who returned to their historical homelands from Russia, especially from Sakhalin. For a long time, they had lived as part of the Japanese or Korean diaspora; however, after returning to their historical homelands, many of them instead became part of the Russian community, preferring to use Russian language services or teach their children in Russian. Inherently, they are immigrants or, using the terminology of Tsuda, ethnic return migrants. In addition, in both cases, these communities of ethnic return migrants are multi-layered in composition and, accordingly, migrants have not double but often multiple layers of self-identification. In Japan, they are not only Russian-Japanese but also Korean-Japanese families. In South Korea, they are identified within two branches of the Korean diaspora–Koreans from Sakhalin and Koryo-saram from mainland Russia and the other countries of the former Soviet Union. Because the authorities and society at large assume that these people are returning to their homeland, even less attention is paid to their cultural and linguistic differences than those of other groups. However, this chapter discusses the many cultural and language issues and problems that they have in adapting to life in the host societies of Japan or South Korea.
