Japanese people in Russia
[4] Japanese settlement in Russia remained sporadic, confined to the Russian Far East, and also of a largely unofficial character, consisting of fishermen who, like Dembei, landed there by accident and were unable to return to Japan.[5] However, a Japanese trading post is known to have existed on the island of Sakhalin (then claimed by the Qing dynasty, but controlled by neither Japan, China, nor Russia) as early as 1790.[6] However, the majority would remain in Japanese territory until the closing days of World War II, when the whole of Sakhalin came under Soviet control as part of the USSR's invasion of Manchuria; most Japanese fled the advancing Red Army, or returned to Japan after the Soviet takeover, but others, mainly military personnel, were taken to the mainland of Russia and detained in work camps there.[13] Following Japan's surrender, 575,000 Japanese prisoners of war captured by the Red Army in Manchuria, Karafuto, and Korea were sent to camps in Siberia and the rest of the Soviet Union.[14] Rank was no guarantee of repatriation; one Armenian interviewed by the US Air Force in 1954 claims to have met a Japanese general while living in a camp at Chunoyar, Krasnoyarsk Krai between May 1951 and June 1953.