Lose the K

last updated 8 January 2015

Seoul

The South Korean government is considering changing the English spelling of Korea to Corea. At a recent academic conference, scholars from both North and South Korea said that the use of the K was imposed by Japan when it brutally colonized the peninsula early in the 20th century. Before that, British maps spelled the country with a C. Historians speculate that the Japanese changed the spelling so that Japan would come first alphabetically in the 1908 Olympics. Now the issue has moved from the academy to politics. A group of South Korean legislators introduced a resolution last week to change the spelling. It wouldn’t be the region’s first politically motivated name change: A few years ago, the South Korean government began referring to the Sea of Japan as the East Sea