History
The city was founded in 1882 as the village Vladimirovka, but was transferred to Japanese control after the end of the Russo-Japanese war. The Japanese renamed the city as Toyohara, and made it the capital of the Japanese prefecture Karafuto occupying the southern half of the island. After the end of of World War II, Soviet troops occupied Karafuto, and the city was renamed Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk when control of the city was transferred back to Russia. Little remains of the Japanese administration apart from a very limited number of Japanese buildings, including the impressive old government building now used as a regional museum. The main heritage of the Japanese ownership of the city is a sizable number of Sakhalin-Koreans, deported here by the Japanese in the 1930s, and denied repatriation until the mid-1980s; many have decided to stay on Sakhalin, and around 20.000 reside in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.
