ABSTRACT
The process of repatriation itself and the often tragic personal accounts of the struggles of 'repatriates' to return to Japan have gained a degree of scholarly attention. Making use of repatriate association registers, and a national survey conducted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MHW), this chapter examines how repatriates negotiated the passage through wartime to postwar and how former colonial residents fared in the first decade of Japan's economic reconstruction. The desirability of the repatriation of the nationals of defeated nations had been agreed upon by the Allied powers prior to Japan's surrender. Karafuto, located in southern Sakhalin, was a Japanese colony that had been acquired following the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. Research into the repatriation phenomenon has been limited until recent years and has tended to focus on the process of returning to Japan. The reemployment of repatriates was the most important factor in their economic reintegration.
