I recently visited your website, Deutsche Karte und das ″Japanische Meer″ | Asien | DW | 28.03.2019. Also, only the ‘East Sea’ of Korea is marked as ‘Japanische Meer (Sea of Japan)’ on your website, but this is wrong. Since Japan has been insisting on ‘East Sea’ as ‘Sea of Japan’, this error may occur on many websites, including yours.

However, in many old Western maps, ‘East Sea’ is used more often than ‘Sea of Japan’, so both names must be used on maps and websites.  

The East Sea is a diamond-shaped blue sea east of Eurasia. The East Sea is surrounded by South Korea, North Korea, Russia and Japan. While Korea calls it the ‘East Sea’, major maps of Japan and the world call it the ‘Sea of Japan’.

This is the result of the unification of world names in the early 20th century and the loss of Korea's sovereignty and Japan's international status. Although South Korea has raised objections since its independence in 1945, the case remains unresolved in the international community. If you open the map, you can see that the ‘East Sea’ faces four countries: South Korea, North Korea, Russia, and Japan. It is clear that many countries have sovereignty both geographically, economically and politically. However, it is not right to write the name of a particular country alone.

International organizations are encouraged to use different names in areas shared by two or more countries, and if not, before the countries concerned agree. Currently, Korea and Japan have different claims, so it is up to international standards to take the two nominations together until the agreement is reached.

So we have to name this sea ‘East Sea’ and ‘Sea of Japan’, and I would like to recommend this fact to you. There are various debates around the world over the name and sovereignty of the territory. In order to judge from an objective point of view, we must write several names together, and in that case, we must use one name to unify one name. Therefore, please consider the above recommendations to improve the objectivity of the website by judging the history fairly.

Thank you very much.

Best regards.

Yudam Kim.