Iryna Rudenko

By Lee Tae-hoon

Iryna Rudenko, editor in chief at the Ukrainian State Scientific and Production Enterprise, "Kartographia," was one of the first persons in the former Soviet republic to discover that Russians had long referred to the body of water between Korea and Japan as the East Sea.

She made the discovery shortly after the Korean Embassy in Ukraine proposed to change the name of Sea of Japan to East Sea in 2002.

Rudenko spent many days digging up resources available at the National Library of Ukraine and Russian National Library.

“From that moment I studied and searched old maps in an effort to use the right name for the disputed water on Ukraine maps,” she said. “Soon, I realized that the original name referring to the contentious sea area between Korea and Japan was the East Sea until the 17th century.”

Rudenko said she found that historical facts provided by the Korean Embassy matched with the historical documents that she found by her own research, based on which she wrote two articles for geographic magazines.

“The two articles explain my conclusion that the original name was the East Sea,” she said.

Thanks to her discovery, textbooks and official maps of Ukraine all began to name the body of water as “East Sea/Sea of Japan,” as recommended by the United Nations.

“Japanese people from the embassy have lodged complaints and protested, but we are not going to make any change. The Ukrainian government is in support of the use of both names,” she said.

Rudenko was in Seoul for a six-day cultural exchange program hosted by the Korea Foundation.

Meanwhile, the five-day sea-naming conference of the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) started in Monaco Monday with more than 300 delegates from 80 member states attending.

Currently, the IHO's sea maps refer to the waters between the two neighboring countries as the Sea of Japan.

Korea hopes that the IHO will reverse an earlier decision and seeks the concurrent use of East Sea and Sea of Japan to refer to the sea at this week's meeting aimed at revising a key document titled "Limits of Oceans and Seas."

The IHO document is considered the basis of oceanic boundaries and names all over the world.

For decades, South Korea has locked horns with Japan over the name of the body of water, with Seoul calling it the East Sea while Tokyo uses the name Sea of Japan.

At previous IHO meetings, Japan lobbied for hydrographers to stick with the current name.