Dear Chris,

Hi! I am a high school student in South Korea, and thank you for your free information sharing from Wikimedia Commons which is a media file repository making available public domain and freely licensed educational media content to everyone. It's so useful site for everyone, but I'd like to inform you some errors about the name of the sea related to sensitive history between Korea, and Japan.

 For 2000 years the name of this body of water has been the East Sea. Korea’s oldest history book, The history of Three Kingdoms’ records that the name East Sea had been in use since 37 B.C. The name East sea was introduced to the Europeans as the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago began to appear on world maps following the worldwide voyages of discovery in the 16th century. Until the 19th century, the sea area was variously called, the sea of korea, the eastern sea, the oriental sea, and the sea of japan. However, japanese influenced in East Asia began to rise rapidly in the 19th century, and in 1910,japan annexed Korea. At that time, Japan try to convert local geographical names to Japanese. Against this background, the first edition of oceans and seas published by IHO in 1929 used only the name Japan Sea. Korea has made continuous efforts to restore the name East Sea for decades. The UNCSGN and the IHO recommend that when countries sharing a given geographical feature fail to agree on a common name, competing names should be concurrently used.

Therefore we sincerely hope you will understand the relavant facts and historical background of the matter and I hope this real facts would be helped for you . Above all, I really appreciate for you to read my long letter. Hope you will change the word to East Sea from Sea of Japan.

Best Regards,

Hyunseo Lee