Kunashir

Kunashir lies between the straits of Kunashir Island, Catherine, Izmena, and South Kuril. Kunashir Island is visible from the nearby Japanese island of Hokkaido, from which it is separated by the Nemuro Strait.

• Area: 1,490 km² (580 sq mi)
• Length: 123 km (76 mi)
• Width: 4–30 km (2.5–18.6 mi)

Kunashir Island is formed by four volcanoes which were separate islands but have since joined together by low-lying areas with lakes and hot springs. All these volcanoes are still active: Tyatya (1,819 m (5,968 ft)), Smirnov, Mendeleev (Rausu-yama), and Golovnin (Tomari-yama).[1] The island is made up of volcanic and crystalline rocks.

• 
  Relief map
• 
  View of Kunashir from the Rausu Kunashiri Observatory Deck
• 
  Cape Stolbchaty on the western side of the island

Environment

Sulfuric River, Kunashir Island

The climate is humid continental with very heavy precipitation especially in the autumn and a strong seasonal lag with maximum temperatures in August and September. The vegetation mostly consists of spruce, pine, fir, and mixed deciduous forests with lianas and Kuril bamboo underbrush. The mountains are covered with birch and Siberian Dwarf Pine scrub, herbaceous flowers or bare rocks. Tree cores of century-old oaks (Quercus crispula) were found in July 2001 on Kunashiri Island.[2]

The original inhabitants of the island—as with most of Hokkaido and the Kurils—were the Ainu. Europeans are first recorded visiting this part of the Kurils in 1643[4] when the Castricum under Maarten Gerritsz Vries was exploring Hokkaido and the surrounding area for the Dutch East India Company (VOC).[5] Vries's account of the area was incredibly garbled[6]—including a fictitious continental extension dubbed Company Land—but while his imaginary Staten Island is usually connected to Iturup,[7] its placement on most maps of the period more closely resembles the location of Kunashir. Vitus Bering's lieutenant Martin Spanberg mapped the actual locations of the Kurils including Kunashir in a series of voyages in 1738, 1739, and 1742 but Company Land and Staten Island continued to appear in European maps decades afterwards.[8]

The Japanese expanded north to Kunashir in the 18th century, with the Matsumae clan establishing a fishery and trading site called Kunashiri-basho (国後場所) in 1754.[9] Its headquarters was located in Tomari (present-day Golovnino) and administered Kunashir, Iturup, and Urup.

In 1789 Kunashir Island was one of the settings of the Menashi-Kunashiri Battle in which native Ainu revolted against Yamato Japanese tradespeople and colonists.

Vasily Golovnin (left person) taken prisoner

Russian navigator Vasily Golovnin attempted to map and explore the island in 1811, but was apprehended by Japanese authorities and spent two years in prison.

Kunashir Island coastline: photo taken by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in November 2010

On September 1, 1945, or one day before the surrender documents of World War II were signed on September 2, 1945, in accordance with understandings reached at the Yalta Conference, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied the Kuril Islands. This occurred after the Soviet Union renounced the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact signed in April 1941, and declared war on Japan on August 9, 1945 (formally, the pact itself remained in effect until April 13, 1946). Although Japan agreed after deliberations to cede its claims to "the Kurile Islands" as part of the Treaty of San Francisco in 1951, the Japanese government has claimed since the mid-1950s that the southern islands were not part of the ceded Kuril Islands.

The largest settlement on Kunashir Island is Yuzhno-Kurilsk, administrative center of Yuzhno-Kurilsky District.

The primary economic activity is fishing. The island has a port next to Yuzhno-Kurilsk. Kunashir Island enjoys a Mendeleevskaya GeoPP geothermal power plant with the capacity of 1.8 MW.[10]

The island is served by Mendeleyevo Airport.

After the 1994 earthquake, about one-third of Kunashir Island's population left and did not return. By 2002, the island's population was approximately 7,800. The total population of the disputed Kuril islands at that time was approximately 17,000.[11]

• Kuril Islands dispute

• Sakhalin Oblast

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