The government will appeal to international society to acknowledge the body of water between Korea and Japan as “East Sea,” instead of or alongside the current name of “Sea of Japan.”
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade on Friday announced that a government delegation would attend the 18th general meeting of the International Hydrographic Organization scheduled from Monday through Thursday in Monaco. IHO is the body responsible for uniformity in nautical charts and documents.
The authorities said the delegation would focus on persuading 80 member states to have the international organization formally adopt the East Sea as the name for the waters between Korea and Japan because the currently used term, Sea of Japan, reflects the unilateral claims of the Japanese administration to sovereignty over the waters.
The IHO publishes “Limits of the Oceans and Seas” which contains geographic information about maritime affairs. The sea, described as the Sea of Korea in several international historical books predating the colonial era, has been described as Sea of Japan since 1929, during the Japanese colonial regime (1910-1945.) The name has not been revised yet despite constant appeals from the Korean government and civic society.
The meeting, which will review the book’s 33rd revision, will deal with the issue once again, the authorities said. “If not possible, we will ask for the IHO to mark both East Sea and Sea of Japan,” a ministry official said.
Currently, more than 20 percent of the countries around the world use both names.
A civic group, The Dokdo Network, on Saturday held a rally near Eiffel Tower in Paris for the adoption of East Sea.
A Korean community in the U.S., the Korea-America Association of Virginia, is also holding an online petition campaign with the White House, urging American publishers of school textbooks to refer the waters as both East Sea and Sea of Japan.
More than 31,000 people have signed up the petition, meeting the 25,000 needed to require the presidential office issue a formal response to the petition. Last year, the U.S. State Department announced that it will solely adopt Sea of Japan, according to “internationally recognized terminology.”
By Bae Ji-sook (
baejisook@heraldcorp.com)
