hankyoreh

South Korea and Japan are expected to collide head-on next week over the name of the waters between the two countries, a contentious issue in their checkered relationship, officials said Monday.

Seoul officials plan to ask the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) to consider adopting the Korean name of the "East Sea" along with the "Sea of Japan" when the organization holds a general meeting in Monaco on May 7-11 to update its sea maps this year.

"We will never tolerate the sole use of Sea of Japan. The government position is that East Sea and Sea of Japan be used together, so we will make efforts to prevent the IHO from holding a vote on the issue. If the vote is held, we will pursue the goal of making member countries abstain," a senior Foreign Ministry official said on condition of anonymity.

The official said the prevailing sentiment of the member countries is to recognize the current single use of Sea of Japan, so should the vote take place, it would be disadvantageous to South Korea. South Korea has long campaigned for the adoption of the East Sea for the waters that have been widely adopted as the Sea of Japan, since Japan registered it as the official name of the waters with the IHO in the early 1920s, when Korea was under Japan's colonial rule.

The South Korean delegation, led by Song Young-wan, director general of the International Organization Bureau at the ministry, will leave for Monaco on Saturday. The team will consist of officials from foreign ministries and fishery ministries, as well as scholars from state-run research centers.

The IHO published its first oceanographic chart for the region in 1929 and has since updated it three times, but on all of them, the East Sea was marked as the Sea of Japan.

Korean historians and experts believe that the sea's original name was the East Sea, but that the term Sea of Japan became more widely adopted because their country failed to properly counter Japan's campaign to have the name changed due to Korea's colonization by Japan and the 1950-53 Korean War.

The IHO wants South Korea and Japan to settle the issue themselves.

Seoul, April 30 (Yonhap News)