Karafuto Prefecture in the context of "Japanese colonial empire"

The Empire of Japan, also known as the Japanese Empire or Imperial Japan, was the Japanese nation state that existed from the Meiji Restoration on January 3, 1868, until the Constitution of Japan took effect on May 3, 1947. From August 1910 to September 1945, it included the Japanese archipelago, the Kurils, Karafuto, Korea, and Taiwan. The South Seas Mandate and concessions such as the Kwantung Leased Territory were de jure not internal parts of the empire but dependent territories. In the closing stages of World War II, with Japan defeated alongside the rest of the Axis powers, the formalized surrender was issued on September 2, 1945, in compliance with the Potsdam Declaration of the Allies, and the empire's territory subsequently shrunk to cover only the Japanese archipelago resembling modern Japan.

Under the slogans of "Enrich the Country, Strengthen the Armed Forces" and "Promote Industry" which followed the Boshin War and the restoration of power to the emperor from the shogun, Japan underwent a period of large-scale industrialization and militarization, often regarded as the fastest modernization of any country to date. All of these aspects contributed to Japan's emergence as a great power following the First Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese War, and World War I. Economic and political turmoil in the 1920s, including the Great Depression, led to the rise of militarism, nationalism, statism and authoritarianism, during which Japan joined the Axis alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, conquering a large part of the Asia–Pacific; during this period, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) committed numerous atrocities and war crimes, including the Nanjing Massacre. There has been a debate over defining the political system of Japan as a dictatorship, which has been disputed due by the absence of a dictator, and over calling it fascist. The other suggested terms were para-fascism, militarism, corporatism, totalitarianism, and police state.

"Mainland Japan" (内地, naichi; lit. '"inner lands"') is a term used to distinguish Japan's core land area from its outlying territories. "Mainland Japan" was an official term in the pre-war period, distinguishing Japan proper from its overseas territories (外地, gaichi, lit. "outer lands") in the Far East, such as Japanese Taiwan, Japanese Korea, Karafuto, the South Seas Mandate, and the Kwantung Leased Territory. After the end of World War II, its usage became less common and lost its previous legal significance.

The term's literal Japanese meaning might best be translated as "inner Japan" or "inner lands". The term "mainland" is somewhat inaccurate since it usually refers to all or part of a continental landmass, rather than islands. In the pre-1945 period, the "inner lands" included the Japanese archipelago, itself including the Ryukyu Islands and other island chains to the south of Honshu. The "inner lands" also referred during 1875–1945 to the Japanese-controlled Kuril Islands and during 1943–1945 to Karafuto, the southern half of the island of Sakhalin.

This is a list of regions occupied or annexed by the Empire of Japan until 1945, the year of the end of World War II in Asia, after the surrender of Japan. Control over all territories except most of the Japanese mainland (Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku, and some 6,000 small surrounding islands) was renounced by Japan in the unconditional surrender after World War II and the Treaty of San Francisco. A number of territories occupied by the United States after 1945 were returned to Japan, but there are still a number of disputed territories between Japan and Russia (the Kuril Islands dispute), South Korea and North Korea (the Liancourt Rocks dispute), the People's Republic of China and Taiwan (the Senkaku Islands dispute).

Sakhalin Koreans (Korean: 사할린 한인; Russian: Сахалинские корейцы, romanized: Sakhalinskiye koreytsy) are Russian citizens and residents of Korean descent living on Sakhalin Island, who can trace their roots to the immigrants from the Gyeongsang and Jeolla provinces of Korea during the late 1930s and early 1940s, the latter half of the Japanese colonial era.

At the time, the southern half of Sakhalin Island, then known as Karafuto Prefecture, was under the control of the Empire of Japan, whereas the northern half was part of the Soviet Union. The Japanese government both recruited and forced Korean labourers into service and shipped them to Karafuto to fill labour shortages resulting from World War II. The Red Army invaded Karafuto days before Japan's surrender; while all but a few Japanese there repatriated successfully, almost one-third of the Koreans could not secure permission to depart either to Japan or their home towns in South Korea. For the next forty years, they lived in exile. In 1985, the Japanese government offered transit rights and funding for the repatriation of the original group of Sakhalin Koreans; however, only 1,500 of them returned to South Korea in the next two decades. The vast majority of Koreans of all generations chose instead to stay on Sakhalin. Beginning in 2000, Hometown Village, a retirement community for first generation Sakhalins, has operated in Ansan.