The city was founded in 1882, as the village Vladimirovka, but was transferred to Japanese control after the end of the Russo-Japanese war. The Japanese renamed the city as Toyahara, and made it the capital of the Japanese prefecture Karafuto occuping the southern half of the island. After the end of of World War II, soviet troops occupied the Japanese part of Sakhalin, and the city was renamed Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk when owership of the city was transferred back to Russia. Apart from a very limited number of Japanese buildings, including the impressive old goverment building, now a regional museum. The main heritage of the Japanese ownership of the city, is a sizable number of Sakhalin-Koreans, deported here by the Japanese in the 1930s, and denied repatriation until the mid 1980s, many have decided to stay on Sakhalin, and around 20.000 reside in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. http://wikitravel.org/en/Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk