[ISL] "Another postcard from the edge: life on the Kuril Islands"

[rfmcdonald]

Back in January, Ksenya Semenova contributed a travelogue describing life on the Kuril Islands. Still subject of a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, Semenova argues that there are so many other issues relating to life on the Kuril Islands that for their inhabitants an effectively dormant territorial dispute is irrelevant. Sheer insularity is a major issue.

A historic event took place recently on Kunashir, one of the four inhabited islands in the Kuril archipelago. Almost five kilometres of road were asphalted for the first time ever. Not long ago, something like this would have been beyond the islanders’ wildest dreams, but now the residents are promised that the road-building programme on Kunashir will only grow and grow.

[. . .]

No less glorious a development for the Kunashir islanders was the recent opening at the local port of a new deep-water mooring complex, which cost more than 170 million roubles to build. Many readers might not automatically sense the importance of this. Suffice to say that until now, Kunashir residents travelling by ferry from Sakhalin needed to disembark on a pontoon boat. Getting on to that boat, especially during the frequent Kuril storms, was something that terrified even experienced sailors. The new port complex, however, means that the ship can come right in to the shore. A deep-water docking facility is also being constructed on Iturup (the biggest fishing company in the Kuril Islands has had a similar facility there for some time, but only for the use of its own company ships).

Transport remains a crucial issue for the islanders. Of course, they are used to living far away from civilisation and big cities; they are also used to buying food at prices twice as expensive as on Sakhalin – where things are already far from cheap. But they also expect to be able to leave the island at least once a year — onto the ‘mainland’ i.e. Sakhalin, and from there perhaps to the ‘big mainland’. They want to walk the asphalted streets, see shopping centres, go to the theatre and the cinema, see their friends and family.

Sakhalin, it should be noted, the mainland for the Kuril Islanders and the author's home, is itself a Russian island territory in the North Pacific, although one with fifty times the Kuril Islands' population. Insularity is a relative phenomenon.