WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

After the Russian Revolution, the Buryat National Committee struggled to build a stable relationship with the Soviet government and, during the Civil War, aligned with Ataman Grigory Semenov. Seeking autonomy from Semenov, Buryat leaders also pursued contacts with Japan. The Kazakh autonomous government, Alash Orda, after negotiations with the Soviets, fell under Admiral Kolchak’s influence but maintained tense relations with his regime, which rejected its autonomy. Although Alash Orda’s foreign relations were minimal, Japan was the only external power from which its activists sought recognition and military aid. Ultimately, Japan recognized neither Buryat nor Kazakh independence, and many activists were later absorbed into the Soviet system. These intertwined histories show how Japan—an Asian great power advocating Pan-Asianism—both inspired non-Russian peoples and supported the imperial order through backing Kolchak. Despite opposing ideologies, both Japan and the Bolsheviks destabilized and refashioned the imperial order.

This presentation repositions the history of Korean indentured workers in the Soviet Pacific North during the 1940s and 1950s within the longue durée of inter-imperial mobility and constraint forged under the Pax Japano-Russica. It argues that North Korean laborers’ pursuit of more secure livelihoods, visible in the experiences of fishermen and loggers dispatched to the Primorski region, the Sea of Okhotsk, and Southeastern Beringia, was conditioned by geopolitical structures first established through Russo-Japanese rivalry and its management of borderland populations. By tracing how these inherited configurations shaped both the possibilities and limits of inter-bloc circulation in the early Cold War, it demonstrates that the overseas deployment of North Korean workers emerged less from socialist ideology or national allegiance than from the enduring mechanisms of inter-imperial governance that prefigured Cold War order.

This study examines how the Korean residents of Vladivostok navigated the intertwined regimes of Russian and Japanese sovereignty between 1905 and 1923, an early period framed by the fragile Pax Japano-Russica. The shift from the Old Korean Town (Gaechok-ri) to the New Korean Town (Sinhanchon) in 1911 illustrates how Korean residents confronted the practical contradictions of life in a city governed simultaneously by Russian administrative norms and Japanese extraterritorial claims. The relocation did more than redraw the map of Korean settlement. It obliged residents to redefine their civic position within an urban order structured by racialized regulation and competing imperial jurisdictions. Drawing on municipal records, consular reports, and civic petitions, the paper shows that Korean settlers appropriated the legal ambiguities of dual nationality to secure residency, property rights, and communal autonomy amid oscillating Russian and Japanese dominance.

This paper examines Japan’s pre-1940s investigative expeditions to Xinjiang as part of a collaborative yet competitive sphere of scientific imperialism. Japan’s interest in Xinjiang stemmed less from territorial ambition than from efforts to coordinate imperial expansion elsewhere, especially in Manchuria, revealing that the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War did not resolve the geopolitical rivalry between the two powers. This enduring contest shaped northeast Asia well into the twentieth century. Japan’s early-1930s vision of an anti-Communist ring encompassing Afghanistan and Xinjiang prefigured later Cold War strategies. Russo-Japanese rivalry became a world-historical event in 1942, when the Allied powers revived the northwestern China aid route, prompting Japan to plan intervention deep in Eurasia. This unprecedented Allied coordination centered Xinjiang, Gansu, and Qinghai in Chinese state-building, bringing infrastructure and central armies into the region while ending the long-standing autonomy maintained Muslim authorities.