There are many names to describe this small chain of islands that sit right in the middle of the Sea of Japan — Liancourt Rocks, Dokdo, Takeshima, Bamboo Islands. This is largely due to their status as a disputed territory between Japan and Korea.

When a series of POIs from these islands was registered on the FOAM Map, it was interesting to see how immediately these contested islands in real life translated into contested POIs on the FOAM Map.

At first, one user repeatedly registered Takeshima from a clear pro-Japanese perspective:

The official name of this island is Takeshima. This island is historical, geographical, and territory of Japan also on international law. After the war, Korea has been illegally occupied by force and has reached the present. Korea has no legal basis. They replace the bamboo island around Ulleungdo and claim ownership of Takeshima.

After several attempts of registering this point, it getting successfully challenged, removed, and then re-registered, they finally were able to pass two more POIs under a slightly different naming convention (adding Nishijima and Higashijima for the respective islands).

From the alternative perspective, another user decided to register not the entire island, but a single lighthouse as under the Korean flag. Interestingly this point was approved, which may or may not say something about how the model treats physical structures/buildings over entire territories.

Finally a user picked up on this back and forth and decided to take a neutral approach. They registered the islands as ‘Liancourt Rocks, Korea, Japan,’ which is the Franco-English name for the islands. In their description they put effort into offering up a neutral explanation:

Source of proud nationalisms, the Liancourt Rocks, also known as Takeshima (竹島, “bamboo island”) in Japanese, and Dokdo or Tokto (Korean pronunciation: [tok̚.t͈o]; Hangul: 독도; Hanja: 獨島, “solitary island”) in Korean are a group of small islets in the Sea of Japan. While South Korea controls the islets, its sovereignty over them is contested by Japan. South Korea classifies the islets as Dokdo-ri, Ulleung-eup, Ulleung County, North Gyeongsang Province. Japan classifies them as part of Okinoshima, Oki District, Shimane Prefecture. Also a good fishing ground. Let’s keep it friendly here guys!

So what’s the moral of this story? How does the FOAM Map and the TCR model treat something as overtly complicated as Liancourt Rocks? By the looks of if —there’s certainly a desire for objectivity, as proved by the description above. But does giving something three names, or pleading for friendliness solve the underlying tensions or subjectivity that a POI like this represents? Probably not.

As our friends at Mapbox recently illustrated, there are ways that maps can converge on neutrality, but in the end there is no avoiding the fact that maps are inherently subjective things. Even just looking at a ‘upright’ 2D map — a ‘mercator’ projection of a 3d oblate spheroid — is a subjective task.