By Peter Galuszka

Pity Terry McAuliffe.

It’s hard to be a politician and trying to please everyone, especially when it comes to rivals Japan and South Korea.

The new governor promised Virginia’s large Korean community that he would move to have the state’s textbooks call what is commonly referred to as “the Sea of Japan” as “East Sea” as well.

Japanese, a major trading partner with the Old Dominion, like the former. Koreans, of course, like the latter, since “East” means, east of them. There are lots more people of Korean descent in Virginia than Japanese and they know how to pack a Senate gallery as they did in Richmond recently.

Now that he’s won the election, McAuliffe has to navigate the treacherous waters of both seas made stormy by centuries of East Asian bloodletting, war and colonization. This dispute has reached the highest levels and has become a diplomatic issue for the Embassy of Japan in Washington. According to The Washington Post, Japan is the second largest source of direct foreign investment and is a major export market. South Korea, less so.

Virginia always loses when it considers changing its textbook since its history is just as tortured as Japan’s or South Korea’s. It happened a few years back when a Connecticut-based history book writer claimed, falsely, that African-Americans fought for the South in significant numbers during the Civil War. That was fine with Sons of Confederate Veterans types because it makes the South seem not so bad. But African-Americans were a mite upset.

It’s hard to win with differing versions of history. My big memory is “Ukraine” versus “THE Ukraine.”

Back when the Soviet Union was breaking up I was either a news correspondent in Moscow or an editor in New York on the international desk handling news from that area. When the USSR fell apart, some Ukrainians, mostly in the western part of the country, wanted their country referred to as “Ukraine” instead of “the Ukraine.”

Why? Political etymology. Ukraine means “border” or “edge.” When you add “the” it makes it sound like “edge of what?”

The answer was Russia and centuries of Russian power, domination and imperialism. So, adding “the” makes it sound like Ukraine is the “edge” of Russia rather than its own important self. Another problem is that Russians like to diminish Ukrainians by calling them “Little Russians.” How patronizing! But then, lots of Ukrainian Communists, notably Nikita Khrushchev, made it big in Moscow

The problems are exacerbated when you deal with the diaspora of a particular country. When I was in Moscow in the 1980s, I often went to Ukraine. Same problems as Russia but there had been a lot of intermarriage especially in eastern Ukrainian cities like Kharkov. Not so in the west where Moscow was despised. In general, though, the tension level seemed low.

In the 1990s, I was back in Kiev. We had a stringer or freelance reporter there who spoke fluent Ukrainian and grew up in Canada. Lots of Ukrainians flocked to Canada after the Bolshevik Revolution and they set up an intensely ethnic support system. Our reporter had spent her childhood summers at Ukrainian kids camps in the Canadian wilds and became thoroughly indoctrinated in Ukrainian things. Or, rather, in what were Ukrainian things back in the 1920s.

So, I show up in Kiev and she wants me to meet a new-comer, a Canadian professor of Ukrainian descent who speaks the language. When he asked me where I was based, I said Moscow.

“That really pisses me off,” he said. “What are you, some kind of Russian imperialist? How do you think you can come here from Moscow and understand ANYTHING about Ukraine?

Good question.