Tyukonkhi in the village of Sadovniki

On the outskirts of Sadovniki, a village in the Kholmsk municipal district of Sakhalin Oblast, stands a stone stele about 1.7 metres tall on a rubble-concrete base — a memorial stone from the Japanese period known as a tyukonkhi. It can be seen from the parking lot by the local beach, though reaching it on foot is not easy: the path to the stele is overgrown with thick rose hip bushes.

What a tyukonkhi is

Tyukonkhi (忠魂碑, chūkonhi, "stone of loyal souls") are Japanese memorial stones that were set up at Shinto shrines in honour of soldiers who died in war. According to Shinto belief, during a special memorial ceremony called shōkonsai, the souls of the fallen would ascend to heaven through such a stone and become deities, kami, who then watched over the living. Monuments like this once stood at village shrines across southern Sakhalin, which from 1905 to 1945 was part of Japan under the name Karafuto: typically a modest vertical stele on a pedestal, carrying an inscription in Japanese characters and facing toward the battlefields or the soldiers' homeland.

History of the Sadovniki stone

After 1945 the Japanese population was removed from southern Sakhalin, and the settlements and shrines they left behind were largely lost — wooden buildings were dismantled or fell into disrepair, while stone monuments were often abandoned, buried, or moved aside as the land was put to new use. The Sadovniki tyukonkhi survived in exactly this way, on the spot where a Shinto shrine once stood in the Japanese settlement that preceded today's Sadovniki. The stone was found near the port, in an area used for coal loading — workers of the Gornyak-2 coal enterprise came across it and reported the find. Today it is one of the few surviving physical traces of the Japanese period in this part of the island: neither the earlier settlement nor its shrine has survived, but the stone stele still stands in its original place.

Sadovniki and its surroundings

Sadovniki is a former railway stop on the Kholmsk–Tomari line, now a small settlement on Sakhalin's west coast, by the shore of the Strait of Tartary. To reach the tyukonkhi, walk to the parking lot by the local beach: the stele is visible from there, and getting right up to it means pushing through the dense rose hip thickets that have grown around the stone over the decades.