A nearly tideless marginal sea has a contested English name
The Sea of Japan sits between the Japanese archipelago, Sakhalin, Korea, and Russia’s Far East, almost sealed from the Pacific and thus nearly tideless like the Mediterranean. High dissolved oxygen drives rich fisheries, while shipping volumes stay politically sensitive yet are rising with East Asian economies.
English usage favours Sea of Japan, matching the Japanese Nihon-kai and Russian Yaponskoye more, while Chinese also once used Jīng hǎi, the Whale Sea. North Korea says Korean East Sea and South Korea simply East Sea. Japan argues that its name has been standard internationally since the early nineteenth century; South Korea replies that East Sea was used earlier. The International Hydrographic Organization’s Limits of Oceans and Seas has printed Japan Sea since 1928, with the last edition in 1953.
For centuries the water shielded Japan from invasion from the mainland, including the Mongol attempts. Russians charted Sakhalin and nearby islands between 1733 and 1743, and Lapérouse sailed through in the 1780s. Adam Johann von Krusenstern crossed it in the Nadezhda between 1803 and 1806, and in 1849 Gennady Nevelskoy found the strait between Sakhalin and the mainland. Later Russian voyages recorded surface temperatures, tides and swirling currents, joined by an American survey from 1853 to 1856 and Britain’s Challenger expedition; systematic Japanese research began only in the 1920s.
American, Canadian and French whalers hunted here from 1847 to 1892, usually entering through the Korea Strait and leaving by La Pérouse Strait. They chased right whales from March to September, turning to humpbacks as catches fell, and found that blue and fin whales sank once killed. More than 170 ships worked the sea in the peak years of 1848 and 1849.
The basin was once landlocked behind an East Asian land bridge. It began opening in the Early Miocene, splitting northern and southern Japan apart, and kept widening through that epoch.
Source: Sea of Japan
