A dispute exists over the international name for the body of water which is bordered by Japan, Korea and Russia. In 1992, objections to the name Sea of Japan were first raised by North Korea and South Korea at the Sixth United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names. The Japanese government supports the exclusive use of the name "Sea of Japan" , while South Korea supports the alternative name "East Sea", and North Korea supports the name "Korean East Sea". Currently, most international maps and documents use either the name Sea of Japan by itself, or include both the name Sea of Japan and East Sea, often with East Sea listed in parentheses or otherwise marked as a secondary name. The International Hydrographic Organization, the governing body for the naming of bodies of water around the world, in 2012 decided it was still unable to revise the 1953 version of its publication S-23 – Limits of Oceans and Seas, which includes only the single name "Sea of Japan", to include "East Sea" together with "Sea of Japan".

Iran and the Arab countries have been involved in a long-running geographical naming dispute over what has been historically and internationally known as the Persian Gulf. Connected to the Gulf of Oman and thereby to the Arabian Sea through the Strait of Hormuz, it is an extension of the Indian Ocean. In the Western world, the Gulf's namesake is Persia, which is Iran's Western exonym. The name of the Persian Gulf was not contested at a high level until the popularization of Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism around the 1960s, when the Arab countries increasingly sought to suppress Iranian influence in the Middle East and on the international stage. Thus, the toponym "Arabian Gulf" or simply "Gulf" was adopted and asserted by Arab governments and Arab media, led by the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf. On the other hand, Iran and Iranian media have asserted the name "Persian Gulf" exclusively.