CHAPTER 5: EAST SEA
5.2.2 OTHER INITIATIVES
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name usage at the global level at least demonstrates an increased awareness of the dispute, and accommodation of Korea’s claims.
Official and unofficial efforts continue. In February 2017 the ROK Foreign Ministry uploaded a series of promotional videos to its official website which claims, “Japan knows the truth” and calls for greater awareness of the name East Sea (Kim 2017). In April 2017, South Korea sent a delegation made up of 30 government officials and private experts to the most recent IHO meeting. Just as in previous meetings, there goal was to have the waters labeled solely as the “East Sea,” or settle for dual use of "East Sea" and "Sea of Japan" until an agreement is reached on the matter between the two countries (KBS 2017).
It is worth noting that a singular example of compromise was attempted by former Korean President Roh Moo-hyun. In November 2006, during the APEC summit in Hanoi, Roh informally proposed to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that the sea be renamed the "Sea of Peace" or "Sea of Friendship.” Abe, of course, rejected the idea and in the following year Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki reiterated, stating that there was no need to change the name of the Sea of Japan (Japan Times 2007).
5.2.2 Other Initiatives
In addition to official government campaigns, there are also many private efforts to promote and disseminate information about the East Sea, often including Dokdo. However, private citizens and organizations frequently act in close coordination with their local and national government offices to promote the East Sea and Dokdo together.
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For example, the Society for the East Sea is a non-profit group that was established by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1994 to promote the use of the term East Sea more globally.
According to their website, the organization accomplishes this by inviting foreign experts to international seminars in order to explain and justify dual name usage for the sea. The organization’s first president was the former Minister of Science and Technology, but subsequent presidents have been from academia. Since its foundation, the organization has continued to maintain close relationships with multiple government agencies including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Korea Hydrographic and Oceanographic Agency, the National Geographic Information Institute (NGII), the Korean Culture and Information Service, the Northeast Asian History Foundation, and the Korea Foundation12.
The Northeast Asian History Foundation (NEAHF) is a very active state-funded organization that bills itself as a research institute dedicated to promoting peace in Northeast Asia by confronting and correcting alleged “historical distortions.” Through research, activism, political lobbying and partnership with related organizations, the group publishes research papers and promotional materials in foreign languages for global distribution. The organization has a Dokdo Research Institute as an internal department that works with NEAHF to support the ROK’s Dokdo/East Sea claims by “developing strategies [as well as] educational and promotional activities to correct inaccurate understandings about Dokdo and the East Sea, often collaborating with civic and social organizations to do so...in order to lay out the basis for peace in Northeast Asia” (Dokdo Research Institute). This includes publishing educational materials in order to build support for Dokdo and East Sea among Korea’s elementary, junior and high school students (Northeast Asian History Network).
12 Please refer to the ‘Introduction’ section of their website to find this information:
http://eastsea1994.org/eng/html/
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Although VANK (Voluntary Agency Network of Korea) doesn’t directly receive support from the Korean government, it states on its website that it does collaborate with other government affiliated organizations. This quasi-governmental “cyber diplomacy” organization advertises itself as a group promoting global citizenship and international exchange, but does so by organizing its members (mainly elementary, middle, high school and university students) to promote Dokdo overseas, find cases of the East Sea being mislabeled, and then address these
“inaccuracies” by requesting through email that these errors be fixed (VANK).
And finally, after years of campaigning by ROK supported Korean-American civic groups, the House of Delegates in the U.S. State of Virginia passed legislation to use both “Sea of Japan” and “East Sea” in all local school textbooks (Robertson 2014). This success galvanized Korean-American groups in other U.S. states to also begin pushing for revised textbooks (Park 2014).
No doubt these unofficial initiatives on the part of private Korean citizens and organizations have contributed greatly to the increasingly used dual name “Sea of Japan/East Sea,” despite the apparent lack of progress in the ROK’s official campaigns at the UN and IHO.
5.3 Analysis
According to the analytical framework used in this thesis, Korea’s behavior regarding the East Sea issue must be analyzed to determine the extent to which they have remained committed to middlepowerism in three key areas: multilateralism, compromise and exercising leadership toward peace.
5.3.1 Multilateralism
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Does Korea favor multilateral solutions on the East Sea conflict in order to show itself as a good international citizen? In a sense, yes. To handle the dispute, Korea has taken up the issue with two different international bodies (UNCSGN and IHO) and pressed its claim according to international law. But since this didn’t produce the desired results, the ROK has at the same time invested much time and money into organizing unofficial East Sea campaigns to get around the law by pressuring map publishers, foreign educational systems and international companies into adopting a new status quo in which both names are used anyway.
Since this tactic has proven much more successful and because the East Sea issue is deeply important to most Koreans, it is likely that Seoul will continue to funnel more resources into this strategy. Korea first attempted multilateral approach, but when this failed, they abandoned it for another strategy that proved to be more effective. Since it hasn’t offered the benefits they seek, Korea is apparently unwilling to persist with multilateralism to solve the East Sea conflict.
5.3.2 Compromise
When there’s a chance to make a deal with Japan on the East Sea, does Korea offer or accept negotiations, or turn away from compromise? Superficially, Korea tries to present an image that its dual name framework is a legitimate compromise. South Korea argues that the sea should not be designated by the name of a single country, which seems reasonable. According to Korea’s National Geographic Information Institute, the ROK’s official position is that “The Republic of Korea believes that naming such a sea area after a particular country's name is not justified and that the sea should have a neutral name. The name "East Sea," [is] neutral [in]
character” (Kim 2005). In other words, Korea’s preferred name “East Sea” is justified because it
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is neutral. But if “East Sea” is preferred by Korea, then it can’t be a neutral name. If this is an attempt at peaceful compromise, it makes little sense.
If South Korea was sincerely seeking out a compromise, it would lobby for a name that neither they nor the Japanese were already sympathetic toward, something like “Pacific Sea” or
“Sea of East Asia,” as Roh Moo-hyun did in the 90’s with his “Sea of Friendship” proposal. At the time of this writing, there have been no other such proposals; Roh Moo-hyun’s gesture seemed to have been a one-off event. There is no real attempt at compromise here, just an unrelenting campaign to demonize and delegitimize the name Sea of Japan while popularizing the name East Sea by framing it as an endeavor to rectify the injustices of Japanese colonialism.
5.3.3 Leadership
Has Korea taken leadership of the East Sea issue to move it in the direction of greater peace & stability? Once again, the answer here is a clear negative. Korea’s entire motivation for pressure on this issue is deeply tied to anti-Japanese nationalism and the nation’s desire to undo aspects of of Japanese colonialism that still lingers into the present.
The “East” in East Sea clearly refers to a Korea-centric geographical location. The same is true of Korea’s name for “West Sea” for the body of water off of its west coast, rather than the internationally accepted Chinese name Yellow Sea. Likewise, the body of water to the south is called the South Sea in Korean, though internationally it's simply the Korea Strait, and beyond that, the East China Sea.
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Picture 6: South Korea refers to its surrounding waters as the East Sea, South Sea, and West Sea.13
South Korea drives hard to present its case for the East Sea in the international arena, but there is no similar campaign to promote use of the names West Sea or South Sea.
Moreover the Korea Hydrographic and Oceanographic Agency (KHOA) devotes entire sections of its website dedicated to both Dokdo and the East Sea, with extensive maps, documents and videos explaining why the body of water’s true name is East Sea, not Sea of
13Source: Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Japan_naming_dispute#/media/File:South_Korea_map_-_en.png
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Japan.14 This is not moving the issue toward greater peace and stability, on the contrary, it provocative behavior that could invite a strong reaction from the Japanese side, or at the very least is not terribly likely to motivate the Japanese to consider cooperating.
It is also important to notice that the map on KHOA’s English website even uses the name Yellow Sea rather than West Sea. In short, South Korea pays no mind to the West Sea, but lobbies hard for the East Sea. This is telling because it suggests that foreign policy here is strongly driven more by anti-Japanese nationalism than by the peaceful compromise associated with middlepowerism. A foreign policy driven by nationalistic concerns in this way is simply not reflective of a nation willing to take leadership to solve a bilateral historical conflict such as this one.
14 The Agency’s East Sea webpage is available here:
http://www.khoa.go.kr/eng/kcom/cnt/selectContentsPage.do?cntId=eastsea_submain
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