The government of Japan has, for months, taken issue with some of the geographic naming choices on display in Google Maps. That dispute has now gone beyond politics into the realm of the artistic, with Japan withholding an award for Google Maps selected by the country’s designers.

At issue: a handful of islands and bodies of water that Google Maps handles differently than the Japanese government feels appropriate. A tiny group of islets that is called Takeshima in Japan, for example, is known in South Korea as Dokdo, and is given various names in Google Maps. Japan has been leaning on government agencies to “pay special attention to make sure that the names of places conform to our policies,” and has encouraged the use of maps from the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan.

But some have complained that those official maps aren’t high-quality, nor are they easy to use; one observer from one of Japan’s national universities has said that Google Maps are “so convenient that it is too hard to find a replacement.” Add that to Google Maps’ near first-mover status, and you have a digital ubiquity that puts it in the cross-hairs of those who take issue with the editorial approach the company takes with its cartography.

Among the fans of Google Maps’ attractiveness, completeness, and ease of use is that Japan Institute for Design Promotion. Since 1957, the institute has voted for the winner of its Good Design Grand Award. Last year’s went to a kids’ television program called Design Ah!; the year before, it went to Honda’s in-car navigation system, particularly for the way it was kept up-to-date in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake.

The designers’s choice this year was Google Maps, but the prime minister, who officially bestows the award, declined to give it to Google. (The board instead created a Global Design 2013 award and gave that to Google directly.)

Google has wrestled with similar questions in the past, and has tried different strategies: using multiple labels were necessary, or localizing the map so that it appears differently depending on where in the world a user is pulling it up. And then there’s the trick of using the web’s abundance: on the U.S. version of the map surrounding Japan, at least, the contested island mentioned above is linked to a Google search for “Dokdo Takeshima,” which brings up the history of the dispute.

But that approach, too, has its critics. A group of Korean-Americans in Silicon Valley run a site called Fix My Map that makes the case that the fought-over island’s one true name is Dokdo:

The ongoing dispute between these two nations over the ownership of the islets has garnered worldwide media attention and provoked uninformed action from other parties. In particular, Google has chosen to rename Dokdo to Liancourt Rocks on Google Maps. This supposedly “neutral” stance comes from Google’s decision to disregard history and implicitly support this challenge to Korean territorial right and centuries-old ownership of the islets.

“Arbitrarily renaming these islets without official consensus,” they argue, “is an act that undermines Korean sovereignty.”

Elsewhere, Iran has threatened to sue Google over the labeling of what it calls the Persian Gulf and what its neighbors call the Arabian Gulf. The dispute goes back years, and in 2008, Google’s head of global public policy wrote that the company was doing the best that it could in trying circumstances, adding, “we also recognize that we have no monopoly on geographic truth.”

Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.