Word: sakhalin
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...denied, but officially confirmed by the Japanese War Office, was a subsequent skirmish on half-Russian, half-Japanese Sakhalin Island. Soviet frontier guards were said to have crossed the border and fired on a band of Japanese policemen. The incident developed into a dogfight in which, the Japanese claimed, "a dozen" Russians and "several" Japanese were wounded...
...Sakhalin, a 600-mile-long, fish-shaped island directly north of Japan, has always been a dark spot. Before 1850, the island was scarcely inhabited. In 1875, Japan agreed to let Russia have the whole storm-beaten spit. Russia made a grim prison of it, and every year exiled to it some 7,000 prisoners-who then had a 4,000-mile walk across the ice of Tartary Strait and Siberia to the nearest court of appeals. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, Japan won the half of the island which lies south of latitude 50° north...