East Sea

The size of South Korea is 9, 9461㎢, as of 2002, the total population is 47,640,000. So 479 people live within 1㎢ size of the land. It is high density of the population. Many problems in Korea seems to be derived from this high density. Housing, traffic, competitive education and labor opportunity and others. In addition to the main land of a peninsula, it contains 3,200 islands, surprising eh?



East Sea

While the long dispute between Korea and Japan over the geographical name of the sea located between the two countries drags on, the Korean Overseas Information Service recently discovered that old Western maps from the 17th and 18th century generally used the term Sea of Korea or East Sea.

In the survey, conducted between 2001 and 2003, KOIS examined a total of 594 maps manufactured in the 17th and 18th centuries which have been kept in major libraries and museums, including the French National Library, the U.S. Library of Congress, Russian Royal Library, Berlin National Library and The British Library.

The review shows that 420 old maps, or about 70 percent of the total, had the designation East Sea, or other names such as Sea of Korea, Oriental Sea and Gulf of Korea, which it said means that the sea belonged to the Korean peninsula.

Meanwhile, maps which designated the ocean as the Sea of Japan only totaled 70, or just 12 percent. The remaining 104 maps either used both terms or said the sea belonged to China or Russia.
"It is the crucial evidence that the Western countries were well aware of the fact that the sea belonged to the Korean peninsula," according to KOIS.

Disputes over its designation have been raging for a long time. From the early 20th century, the Japanese government has designated the ocean as the Sea of Japan, and more countries began to use this name, instead of East Sea.

Finally, the Korean government asked the 1992 U.N. Geographical Configurations Standardization Meeting to correct the name from "Sea of Japan." Since then, efforts by the Korean governmental and civic groups have continued to regain the original name of the sea.

On the basis of the survey, KOIS recently published a book titled East Sea of Old Western Maps. About 200 pictures of old Western maps manufactured between the 16th and the 18th centuries were recorded.

As well as the publication, KOIS will begin a lecture tour to Europe and the United States from the end of this month and explain why the sea must be designated as East Sea.
Yeonhap News , April 20, 2004 Korea.net