Oriental melon (Cucumis melo L. var. makuwa), also called ‘Korean melon’ or ‘Chamoe’, is widelygrown in East Asia, including Korea, Japan, and China. We used 521 simple sequence repeats(SSRs) to develop a core set of SSR markers as an effective tool for cultivar identification and seedpurity tests in oriental melon. The polymorphism test using a subset of seven cultivars identified 20expressed sequence tag SSR (EST-SSR) and 23 genomic SSR markers that showed high levels ofpolymorphism and simple segregation patterns. These SSR markers were used for DNA fingerprintingin additional 46 commercial cultivars. The average number of alleles per marker was 2.95 and 4.61for the EST-SSR and genomic SSR markers in the 53 cultivars, respectively. For polymorphicinformation content (PIC), we found 0.411 to 0.816 with an average of 0.536 for the EST-SSRmarkers and 0.453 to 0.862 with an average of 0.568 for the genomic SSR markers. The unweightedpair group mean algorithm (UPGMA) dendrograms with the three sets of SSR markers (20 EST-SSR,23 genomic SSR, and all 43 SSR markers) revealed that the 53 cultivars were separated into 4 to 5major clusters. Furthermore, the set of all SSR markers was more effective at identifying the 53 cultivarsrelative to the other two marker sets. Therefore, the 43 SSR markers as a core set will be a valuabletool for several applications, including cultivar identification and seed purity tests in oriental melon.