A Korean community leader in Chicago on Thursday called on Korea to take a calm yet more effective approach to counter Japan’s claim over Dokdo and promote East Sea as a name of the body of water between the two countries.

“Rather than noisy protests or performances, we should focus on building our rationale academically and theoretically to back up our claims,” Kim Jong-gab, the president of the Korean American Association of Chicago, told The Korea Herald.

“When any disputes regarding Dokdo and East Sea flare up, we should be able to provide books and other materials encapsulating our clear positions that should be accessible to anybody at libraries, schools and other organizations around the world.”

Since July 2011 when he took the helm of the association that supports some 180,000 people of Korean descent in Chicago, Kim, 57, has spearheaded global campaigns “to safeguard Dokdo.”

Kim and other Korean-Americans established the headquarters of “DokdoEastsea World Organization” in Chicago last October and its chapters in eight major U.S. cities including New York, Detroit, Kansas and Minneapolis earlier this year. He is also working on establishing chapters in Seoul, Paris and Berlin.

Kim has also led a petition campaign promoting the request to the International Hydrographic Organization that the waters east of the Korean Peninsula be co-named East Sea and Sea of Japan. So far, some 25,000 people have supported the campaign.

“We have contacted and met U.S. government officials not as Korean citizens, but as U.S. citizens. As people of Korean descent, who cherish Korean heritage, we stressed to them it was not appropriate to refer to the waters only as Sea of Japan,” he said.

Kim, who has lived in the U.S. since the early 1980s, also seeks to seize on these campaigns to help young overseas Koreans better understand the country of their origin.

“I want to lay the groundwork for these campaigns for Dokdo and East Sea to continue and be spearheaded by those in the States who are currently in their 20s and 30s. That seems to be my duty to raise Dokdo protectors like us in their 50s and 60s,” he said.

Kim plans to expand his initiatives over the co-naming of East Sea by explaining Koreans’ positions to companies that produce history and geographical textbooks, and GPS navigation maps.

Dokdo has been a thorny issue between Seoul and Tokyo. Japan incorporated the islets as part of its territory in 1905 before colonizing the entire peninsula. Korea has been in effective control of them since its liberation in 1945.

The Seoul government has sought to achieve the co-naming for the waters dividing Korea and Japan through a variety of promotional and diplomatic efforts.

By Song Sang-ho (sshluck@heraldcorp.com)