How Japan Got Its Name

Why is Japan called “Japan”? The modern Japanese word for the country, 日本, has a long history, and the English word “Japan” has an even longer history. It all started 2000 years ago.

The oldest recorded names we have for Japan come from the Han Dynasty Chinese (202 BC–220 AD), who invented writing over a thousand years earlier but hadn’t shared with the class yet.

Han documents used Wa (倭) to refer to people who lived somewhere off in the sea to the east. The origin of the name is hotly debated. In fact, everything about the name of Japan is hotly debated. If you’re looking for definitive facts, you’re gonna be as disappointed as my parents when I left my day job to make history videos for validation from strangers online.

Some naively optimistic historians think the character 倭 (pronounced wō in Chinese) was chosen because it sounded like what the Japanese may have called themselves—Ancient Japanese waga meaning “our,” or ware meaning “I, oneself.” But the Chinese character 倭 also meant “bending down,” “submissive, obedient,” so historians more in tune with human nature believe the Han were deliberately calling the Japanese “submissive bowing people.”

Evolution of the Chinese characer wō 倭. Seal script → clerical script → regular script.

There’s another claim that the character wō (倭) was related to the character ǎi (矮), meaning “dwarf,” but this association likely happened later and it wasn’t the original meaning.

A few centuries later, when the Japanese borrowed Chinese writing, they also borrowed the character for Wa. They got wise to the whole submissive bowing thing and were less than charmed. So in the 600s, they started calling their own country “origin of the sun” (日本), pronouncing it sorta like Nifon or Nippon.

At the same time, they started referring to the Chinese as obnoxious jerks, but the characters they used for this are lost to time. Most scholars agree an eggplant emoji was probably involved.

Meanwhile, the term Wa just wouldn’t go away. So in the mid-700s, Japanese scholars replaced the submissive bowing character with a more flattering one: the identically pronounced character for harmony and peace (和).

This whole “writing” thing was really catching on, so why not invent some more cool ways of calling Japan? Yamato was a name that had long been used for the country and its people, and with this new technology it could be scribbled down. Incidentally, linguists can’t seem to agree on the origin of the term Yamato. A refreshing change of pace.

For a while, Yamato was written a whole bunch of different ways, but by the mid-700s, people settled on 大和, or “great harmony”! Of course reading those two characters individually sounded nothing like Yamato, so a bit of imagination and goodwill was required from the reader.

At some point during this whole mess the Chinese were all, “OK, OK, you’re not submissives, we’ll call you that thing about the sun rising.” We know this because Chinese scholars and officials were really big on poems. You got married? Boom! Have a poem. Had a baby? Bam! Another poem. Ancient China was like an Adam West Batman episode but with more rhyme.

A particularly popular type of poem was the farewell poem given to a friend leaving on a journey, like say a trip to some islands off in the Eastern Sea. The name 日本 starts appearing in these poems during the Tang dynasty (608–907 AD).

The Chinese pronunciation of 日本 wasn’t Nippon, but something like Tsjie-pen or Jih-pen (modern Mandarin Chinese: Rìběn).

When Marco Polo was on a family trip to China with his dad (“stop complaining about the food or I’ll turn this caravan around!”) he heard stories about the land of Jih-pen, where the streets were paved with foil Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and the claw machines gave you a cute plushie on every try.

In 1295 he brought the name back to Venice as a souvenir (he wrote it as Cipangu). The name first showed up in English as Giapan. And after a few centuries we ended up with the name Japan.

The result of all this is that today you will still see and hear Wa, Nippon, Nihon (a more modern form of Nifon), and Japan, as well as a handful of other more poetic terms.

The official way to write the name of the country is 日本 , but there is no one official pronunciation or way of writing it in the Latin alphabet. Both Nihon and Nippon are used, and good luck to you if you’re trying to find a rule.

But let’s try anyway. The pronunciation Nippon tends to be correct for names of government departments and programs, and is also how 日本 is written in the Latin alphabet on things like postage stamps and money (Nippon Ginko: Bank of Japan). Oh, but people often call the Bank of Japan Nihon Ginko, because of course they do.

Some compound words like nihonjin (Japanese person) or nihongo (Japanese language) always use the Nihon form. Others are like a Ditto and morph at will: 日本橋 is the name of districts in two different cities, but one is pronounced Nihonbashi (Tokyo) and one Nipponbashi (Osaka). Incidentally, Nippon Ginko is headquartered in Nihonbashi, Tokyo... It’s like no one’s even trying.

Japan’s two largest airlines, ANA & JAL, both use 日本 in their name, but one pronounces it Nihon, the other Nippon.

Perhaps you’d expect passports to say Nippon, but, no, those say Japan, presumably in a futile effort to not further confuse gaijin.

Nippon is easier to shout than Nihon so it’s used for cheers at the Olympics. Probably for the same reason it was the preferred pronunciation in the 1930s and 1940s. Using it in casual conversation today risks giving your message an aggressively nationalistic right-wing tone. Nihon is more common in everyday speech, especially among younger people.

Wa is used in compounds that suggest tradition, like waka (Japanese poetry), washoku (traditional Japanese food), and wagakki (Japanese instruments like shamisen and taiko). It’s also still used in the titles of dictionaries, so a Japanese-English dictionary will say Wa-Ei in the title, rather than Nihongo-Eigo (“Japanese Language-English Language”).

You will occasionally encounter Yamato, and very rarely more poetic forms like Oyashima (“parent island”) or Akizushima (“autumn harbour island”).