Observer
LONG BEFORE PRESIDENT Kim Dae-jung shocked the world by visiting Pyongyang and embracing North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, the animosity between the two Koreas was tempered by one thing they had in common: both disliked the fact that the body of water between Japan and the Korean peninsula was known to the world as the Sea of Japan.
For many years, South Korea had, like Don Quixote, been tilting at windmills, trying to have the international community use a different name.
The South Korean government campaigned in the United Nations, while Korean NGOs such as the Voluntary Agency Network of Korea (Vank) wrote to the CIA World Factbook, as well as Web sites, asking that the name be changed to the East Sea. At the same time, North Korea mounted a similar, though apparently unco-ordinated, campaign. Both argued he sea to the east of the Korean peninsula should be known as the East Sea.
The Koreans insisted that the colonisation of Korea by the Japanese had led to that body of water being known as the Sea of Japan. Long before Japan colonised Korea in 1910, the Koreans said, they had used the name East Sea. They cited historical writings going back 2,000 years.
Historical writings
The Japanese assert that the name Sea of Japan has been in use internationally since the late 18th century and was unrelated to Korea's colonisation. They pointed out that 97 per cent of maps worldwide use the name Sea of Japan.
By and large, Japan didn't pay much attention to the Korean campaign - until August. That was when it became known that the Monaco-based International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO), the arbiter of maritime geographical names, had decided to omit the name Sea of Japan from the draft guidelines for the fourth edition of its publication, The Limits of Oceans and Seas, due to be published next year.
But neither did the IHO use the name East Sea. Because of the dispute, the mapping agency proposed that the sea have no officially recognised name. It asked its 69 member countries to vote in November on whether to drop the Sea of Japan name.
The development was greeted by the Korean media as a huge step in the right direction. 'The latest decision by the International Hydrographic Organisation to omit pages with the name 'Sea of Japan' from its impending publication signifies a commendable step ahead in the international community's move toward recognising Korea's long struggle to overcome a major colonial legacy,' the Korea Herald editorialised.
Japan, however, received the news with consternation. It sent an envoy to Berlin in late August to attend the Eighth United Nations Conference on the Standardisation of Geographical names. However, that conference decided not to get involved in the dispute.
Commendable step
Then, in late September, the IHO withdrew its proposal to put the issue to a vote. It said it would come up with a revised proposal by early next year. South Korean officials said then they would settle for a combination of the two names: East Sea/Sea of Japan.
South Korea's desire to change the names of bodies of water around the Korean peninsula is not limited to the Sea of Japan. It also applies to the body of water to the west of Korea, commonly known as the Yellow Sea. South Korea calls that the West Sea. Thus, while Western news agencies reported on a conflict between North and South Korea in the Yellow Sea in June, the South Korean press uniformly referred to the same event as the West Sea naval clash.
South Korea isn't the only country with its own name for bodies of water adjacent to its land mass. Vietnam, unlike the rest of the world, doesn't call the body of water between it and China the South China Sea. Its preferred name is - what else - the East Sea.
If both Korea and Vietnam had their way, they would no longer have an argument with Japan or China. But then, they may well have an argument with each other, with each claiming that East Sea applies only to the body of water off its eastern coast.
