The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO), an intergovernmental organization representing maritime bureaucrats around the world, decided Thursday not to revise a global chart to include the "East Sea" name for the waters separating the Korean Peninsula and Japan, officials said Thursday.
The decision represented a failure of diplomacy by South Korea for the concurrent use of East Sea and the current "Sea of Japan" appellation to refer to the waters.
"The IHO meeting decided to delay a decision to include the East Sea name and the issue will be discussed at the next meeting in 2017," said a senior official at Seoul's foreign ministry.
Many IHO members expressed the opinion that further consultation is needed because the Japanese delegation reiterated its adherence to the single use of the Sea of Japan name, the official said.
South Korean and Japanese delegates locked horns at the quinquennial IHO meeting this week aimed at revising a global chart, titled "Limits of Oceans and Seas" and better known as S-23, which at present refers only to the Sea of Japan.
South Korea has wanted both references, East Sea and Sea of Japan, to be written in parallel until an agreement is reached.
The naming issue is particularly sensitive for Seoul as Tokyo has continually stepped up efforts to claim the South Korean islets of Dokdo in the East Sea. South Korea keeps a small police detachment on the volcanic outcroppings.
South Korea has long campaigned for the adoption of its favored name for the waters that are widely termed the Sea of Japan, after Japan registered the term as the official name with the IHO in the early 1920s, when Korea was under Japan's colonial rule.
The IHO published its first oceanographic chart for the region in 1929 and has since updated it three times, but each time, the body of water has been marked as the Sea of Japan.
Korean historians and experts believe the sea's original name was the East Sea, but that the term Sea of Japan became more widely adopted because Korea failed to properly counter Japan's campaign to change the name due to Korea's colonization by Japan and the 1950-53 Korean War.
(Yonhap News)
