What language did the Japanes use to communicate with outsiders? In the Tokugawa era, it was Dutch, but before?
Also, did they call them gai-jin to the face?
Last, did other Europeans apart from Portuguese and Dutchmen contact Nippon?

Japan banned all foreigners in like 16 something.

Around 1630, seemingly, but Dutch traders were allowed to stay in the man-made island of Deshima in Nagasaki harbour, only for trading.

Japan banned foreign trade, bar the Dutch, in 1637. This also included banning the contruction of all Japanese sailing vesells above a certain size (i.e. designed for long-distance sea travel), and all ties were cut with the already pretty sizeable expatriot Japanese communities in the Philippines and Indochina.

This is consistent with how Japan had dealt with foreign contacts previously. It was to be done on Japanese terms, and in 1637 they were pretty harsh. The reason the Dutch were offered the deal was that they were considered less potentially dangerous to Japan than either the Portugese or the Spanish.

Contact with Europeans was established in 1542 IIRC. A Spanish ship out of Manilla was wrecked of the Japanese coast. But it was the Portugese who as per Papal specification were allowed a free hand there, and not the Spanish.

Prior to that Japan did have considerable contact with the Asian mainland, China and Korea. As for the language used, everyone with an education knew Chinese. Official texts in Japan were often written in Chinese anyway. And a whole lot of less-than-exciting literary composition was done in Chinese.
At a pinch I suppose buddhism might have made the religiously inclined Chinese, Japanese and Koreans capable of communicating in Sanskrit, should they have liked to. (Since it's an indo-european language the latter might have been useful for the Japanese specialists on things western when learning Latin and Dutch.)

At a pinch I suppose buddhism might have made the religiously inclined Chinese, Japanese and Koreans capable of communicating in Sanskrit, should they have liked to. (Since it's an indo-european language the latter might have been useful for the Japanese specialists on things western when learning Latin and Dutch.)
No need to. The Japanese and Koreans were both using Kanji (literally "Han words" = Chinese text) for formal written communication then. The words would have been read differently in sound by all 3 parties but the meaning they were meant to convey would have been perfectly clear to all 3.

(Thus to nitpick, the ancient Japanese were not writing in Chinese. They were writing in their own language using Kanji, which are identical to Chinese characters.)

So you can use Kanji for writing in either Chinese or Japanese?

Only to a certain extent. Written Japanese is a combination of Kanji and Kana (Katakana, used mostly for words taken from foreign languages, and Hiragana, used for everything else), so to write Japanese you can't use just Kanji.

The Japanese writing system is ridiculously complex, consisting as it does of a combination of logograms and two different systems of syllable-based characters. Kanji isn't really needed at all, since you can write everything in Katakana (children learn Katakana first, and then have to have Katakana "translations" written over the top of Kanji so they can learn those symbols too). And of course it's a bit odd to write Japanese in Chinese characters given that the two languages are totally different. But the Japanese still use Kanji because of the prestige that Chinese culture has always had in Japan.

In the period immediately before the Tokugawa shogunate, there were lots of Italian missionaries in Japan.

Last, did other Europeans apart from Portuguese and Dutchmen contact Nippon?


Very famously so, yes. William Adams, the English pilot, was made an honourary samurai by Tokugawa Ieyasu himself- and became the Shogun's chief advisor on the outside world (much to the horror of the Jesuits).

Adams was the model for Blackthorne in James Clavell's "Shogun".

No need to. The Japanese and Koreans were both using Kanji (literally "Han words" = Chinese text) for formal written communication then. The words would have been read differently in sound by all 3 parties but the meaning they were meant to convey would have been perfectly clear to all 3.
As Plotinus said, structurally Chinese is very different from Japanese and Korean. Chinese will recognise the basic nouns, adjectives and verbs making up a sentance in written Japanese or Korean as the kanji for them are being used, but that's it, it seems. They'll get no real idea about verb tense, negations, who's adressing whom, etc. unless they pick up some of the grammar of these languages.
(If you're wondering I once spent a year as a student of Japanese, in an East Asian Studies program alongside people studying Chinese and Korean, and the general verdict was that none of these languages is actually intelligible to the others. I just did that year, before the Army got hold of me, and when they were done with my sorry arse, I had aquired new interests and never got back to the Japanese.)

What the Korean and Japanese did early on was write Chinese with supplementary diacritial marks as clues to non-Chinese readers how it should be understood. And later they developed their own writing systems that could hand in particular inflection.

But there certainly was no need to muck about with Sanskrit, as the Koreans and Japanse would have learnt Chinese anyway. Not just the kanji, but the entire grammatical structure of it. I just mentioned it as an outside possibility.:)
(Thus to nitpick, the ancient Japanese were not writing in Chinese. They were writing in their own language using Kanji, which are identical to Chinese characters.)
Actually they were writing in Chinese. Bad Chinese. The classical Japanese literature of around 1000 AD written in the Japanese was written by women, and men writing under female pseudonyms ("Tosa Nikki").

Why? Because the females lacked the formal education necessary to write in Chinese proper. The men of the court were expected to write Real Literature in The Only Real Literary Language, i.e. Chinese. The females were supposedly just mucking about with the "crude" native Japanese. But it was the females ended up writing the literary masterpieces (and the odd bloke who realised what the only real ball-game in town was).:goodjob:

And IIRC Chinese continued to be the language of choice for Japanese imperial edicts for centuries afterwards (not that the emperor would wield much power admitedly), so things did get written down officially in Chinese in Japan as well for a very long time it seems.:king:

...The men of the court were expected to write Real Literature in The Only Real Literary Language, i.e. Chinese..
Pretentious bastards.... serves them right they got overshadowed. :p

You never cast aside your roots in favor of a foreign culture. No matter how behind you perceive yourselves to be. Learn from it. Borrow from it. Steal from it if need be. All to improve your own culture. Not what these men did.

Those ancient Japanese women were smarter than their male counterparts. :goodjob:

You never cast aside your roots in favor of a foreign culture.

Why not? I say, follow the culture that you prefer. There's no such thing as "roots" beyond what you choose. If those guys preferred Chinese to Japanese culture, I don't see what's wrong with that.

In the period immediately before the Tokugawa shogunate, there were lots of Italian missionaries in Japan.I thought they were Portugues and Spanish Jesuits...
You never cast aside your roots in favor of a foreign culture.that´s right, look at what happened here in argentina when they started exterminating the gaucho because they were a link with the past! Or at what happened when Japan was westernized and their own traditons were thrown outboard?

Jesuits came from all over. For example, one of the most important missionaries in Asia in the generation after Francis Xavier was Alessandro Valignano, who worked in Japan before travelling to Macau and instructing Matteo Ricci on how best to evangelise the Chinese. Both were Italian Jesuits.

As Oda Nobunaga´s muskets were italians too, I´d say that Italians gave them everything: religion, guns, what else do you need?

Italian muskets? Pah! I'll have you know I had no italian musk...

Oh, wait. You meant that OTHER Oda Nobunaga. The jerk :-)

(More seriously, while the japanesse did import european muskets, they picked up how to make them fairly quickly, and were among the bests at making them by the end of the XVIIth century...as usual when Japan steals someone else idea and start making it for their own).

Italian muskets? Pah! I'll have you know I had no italian musk...

Oh, wait. You meant that OTHER Oda Nobunaga. The jerk :-)

(More seriously, while the japanesse did import european muskets, they picked up how to make them fairly quickly, and were among the bests at making them by the end of the XVIIth century...as usual when Japan steals someone else idea and start making it for their own).
Yeah, the muskets were introduced immediately upon making contact with Europeans in 1642. The Spanish captain who had the misfortune of ending up wrecked on the little island of Tanegashima south of Kyushu presented one to the local lord. (Muskets in Japan were from then on known as "Tanegashima teppo"/"Tanegashima tubes".)

The Japanese knew a good thing when they saw it, took took that musket apart, put it back together and then improved on the design. I.e. already in the late XVIth c. Japanese fire-arms doctrine and design had started to doverge from Europe.
The Japanse simplified the firing mechanism, making it more reliable. The also made the muskets considerably lighter, meaning no need for that supporting fork European used. And finally Japanese doctrine was based upon accuracy rather than rate of fire, which was the case in Europe.

Otoh this didn't prevent Oda Nobunaga from independantly, and ahead of Europe, invent volley-fire as a battle-field tactic, which won him the battle of Nagashino in 1576. (Check it out, or a reasonable reproduction, at the end of Akira Kurosawa's "Kagemusha".):goodjob:

Yeah, saw that in one of my history of Japan class in Uni :-).

What can be said? Japan has a reputation for being the fastest at stealing other people's ideas and improving them for a reason.

Another example from the same period: the Tokugawa shoguns decided, for reasons known only to themselves, that Christianity was undesirable and they mostly stamped it out in the early seventeenth century, forcing the church to go underground. The one idea that they did take from Christianity was crucifixion, which evidently impressed the Japanese; they therefore added this to their methods of capital punishment and used it just as effectively as the Romans ever did.

Quick tip for Oda Nobunaga: If you leave out the "-" you will create a real smilie.

Or at what happened when Japan was westernized and their own traditons were thrown outboard?

When was Japan westernized?:confused:

Another example from the same period: the Tokugawa shoguns decided, for reasons known only to themselves, that Christianity was undesirable and they mostly stamped it out in the early seventeenth century, forcing the church to go underground. The one idea that they did take from Christianity was crucifixion, which evidently impressed the Japanese; they therefore added this to their methods of capital punishment and used it just as effectively as the Romans ever did.
The "crucifixion" seems to have been there before contact with Christianity (minus the symbolism). At least that's what I've always understood?

And neither the Chinese or the Japanese were unaware of the carrying on of the Spanish and Portugese, meaning they felt they had a real reason to take care of the how conquest might follow the cross.
Certainly having a hundred thousand or so of their own social elite converted to Catholicism, with at least one formal Japanese embassy sent to Rome, would have made the Japanese leadership aware of how things had often worked when nations adopted Christianity elsewhere.

So, it would seem to have been a fairly rational political decision to not risk anything here.

When was Japan westernized?:confused:
Depends on when you think someone "westernized" enough to support the claim.

Considering how the Japanse translated and incorporated the entire western conceptual and philosophical tradition in the 19th c. it's very fair to claim that there was one helluw'an impact there.
Though not so much that the Japanse stopped recognising themselves, even if Japan changed considerably in the process.

Of course, had the quite serious 19th c. suggestion that the Japanese should entirely drop their own langauge and one and all adopt English instead been implemented, then we would have been talking of something else altogether.:)

I was under the impression that crucifixion was adopted in Japan only after Christianity arrived, but perhaps I'm wrong - maybe they used it before, but not as much.

You're right that nationalistic fears presumably underlay much of the opposition to Christianity, although in fairness I'd say that if the Japanese really studied the behaviour of the Spanish and Portuguese elsewhere they'd have seen that it was not usually the case that conquest followed the cross. It was typically the other way around - first conquest, then theological justification for conquest, and finally the imposition of Christianity. So the fear that conquest might follow evangelisation might not have been quite so reasonable as you'd think.

re westernisation: I don't think Japan is particularly westernised - the only real exception being clothes. It always annoys me slightly when people describe advanced or affluent Asian nations as "westernised", since the underlying assumption seems to be that to be Asian necessarily means being poor and backward. I've met any number of European or Australian backpackers who think that Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan aren't really, properly, Asian (presumably because their inhabitants don't have the good grace to sit about in filth and squalor so the rich Europeans and antipodeans can admire how picturesque they are...). Of course these nations and others have been influenced by the west, but by the same token, the west has been influenced by them too. For example, these countries are mostly more technologically advanced than most western countries, which means there's influence in the other direction too. I'm typing this on a Fujitsu computer - does that mean I'm "easternised"?

Adding to Plotinus's comments, Hiragana is used to write words which do not have a kanji equivalent, to write particles, and to form the inflections of verbs and adjectives. A particle is usually a single syllable word used to indicate the subject and object of a sentence and other grammatical functions.

Japanese and Chinese kanji are not wholly identical. There are numerous kanji which are peculiar to one or the other. Additionally, Japanese has simplified the writing of many characters. Why have the Japanese continued to use kanji? One reason is that because Japanese has fewer sounds than many other languages it tends to have an over abundance of homonyms. The use of kanji ensures exact understanding in these situations. While there are perhaps 50,000 Japanese kanji characters, in 1946 the Japanese government established a list of 1850 standard characters. These are today the only ones taught in the schools, used in newspapers and in official government communications.

The Japanese also make use of the Roman alphabet (Romaji) in many situations such as signs, advertising, packaging, and computers. Arabic numerals are just as common as Japanese numerals.

Would a Japanese call a foreigner gaijin to his face? Since they do it today, there is no reason to think that they didn't do it in the past. The word gainjin (literally "outside person") is not in and of itself perjorative. A lot has to do with context. Many speakers will use gainjin san or gaijin sama to ensure politeness.

You're right that nationalistic fears presumably underlay much of the opposition to Christianity, although in fairness I'd say that if the Japanese really studied the behaviour of the Spanish and Portuguese elsewhere they'd have seen that it was not usually the case that conquest followed the cross. It was typically the other way around - first conquest, then theological justification for conquest, and finally the imposition of Christianity. So the fear that conquest might follow evangelisation might not have been quite so reasonable as you'd think.

The name Miura Anjin might have had something to do with how the Japanesse formed that impression...

I was under the impression that crucifixion was adopted in Japan only after Christianity arrived, but perhaps I'm wrong - maybe they used it before, but not as much.

You're right that nationalistic fears presumably underlay much of the opposition to Christianity, although in fairness I'd say that if the Japanese really studied the behaviour of the Spanish and Portuguese elsewhere they'd have seen that it was not usually the case that conquest followed the cross. It was typically the other way around - first conquest, then theological justification for conquest, and finally the imposition of Christianity. So the fear that conquest might follow evangelisation might not have been quite so reasonable as you'd think.

re westernisation: I don't think Japan is particularly westernised - the only real exception being clothes. It always annoys me slightly when people describe advanced or affluent Asian nations as "westernised", since the underlying assumption seems to be that to be Asian necessarily means being poor and backward. I've met any number of European or Australian backpackers who think that Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan aren't really, properly, Asian (presumably because their inhabitants don't have the good grace to sit about in filth and squalor so the rich Europeans and antipodeans can admire how picturesque they are...). Of course these nations and others have been influenced by the west, but by the same token, the west has been influenced by them too. For example, these countries are mostly more technologically advanced than most western countries, which means there's influence in the other direction too. I'm typing this on a Fujitsu computer - does that mean I'm "easternised"?
Well, they ARE Japanese.;)

Japan is interesting for being a fully technologically and socialy modern society on par with any western nation. The first one to pull that off after the European take-off in the 18th c. or so.
It's something SciFi writers somehow discovered in the 80's; we may have thought technology will make the future different, when in reality what will really seem alien to us is more likely to be social/cultural difference, with the Japanese offering a ready version for thinking about how society will be alien to us in the future.

Does modern mean being "westernised"? Many westerners seem to think so. (So did the Japanese reformers in the 19th c.)
But on the hole all these sweeping assertions about "western civilisation" and some kind of eternal "oriental spirit" that has been bandied about (and keeps getting bandied about) just helps to mask the fact that all societies are mongrels. We pick and mix, but the resulting synthesis is never possible to reduce to a simple process of someone having "given themselves over" and surrendered in view of the superior achievements of someone else.
:)

[Oda] I hadn't heard of him - interesting story. If the Japanese authorities were being fed the views of typical Englishmen about Catholicism, then that would go some way towards explaining why they took against it.

Takhisis: You call the place "Nippon". In fact, to Europeans, Japan was variably known as "Zipangu" / "Zimpagu" / "Zinpagoo" / "Chipangu", or other similar variations throughout the period in question. You can see this on the earliest maps presenting Japan, c. 1400s and right into the late 17th century (and rarer cases beyond that time). I don't know when they stopped calling it that name but it was used well into the late Renaissance in Europe.

I do know when they started calling it so. You can see this in Marco Polo's "Il Milione", published in the 1290s, which later became known in English as "The Travels of Marco Polo". This also refers to Japan as "Chipangu ".
Chipangu [wrote Polo] is an Island towards the east in the
high seas, 1500 miles distant from the Continent; and a very
great Island it is.

The people are white, civilized, and well-favored. They are
Idolaters, and are dependent on nobody. And I can tell you the
quality of gold they have is endless.... (2)

Polo had never been to Japan, but he had his information from the
Great Khan, who although described by Polo as more than a match
for the combined power of all the Christians and Saracens in the
world, had himself been repulsed by the inhabitants of this
island kingdom. Polo's great respect for the power of these
islanders had a profound effect on later geographer's
descriptions of Zipangu as will be seen in the remainder of this
paper.

Of crucial importance from the standpoint of the Age of
Discovery, however, was his description of Zipangu as 1,500 miles
distant from Asia. It has been pointed out that this error in
the location of Japan stems from Polo's confounding the Chinese
li, of which there are 250 in one degree of latitude, with the
Italian mile, of which there are sixty to one degree.

Washburn, Wilcomb E. "Japan on Early European Maps" (http://muweb.millersville.edu/~columbus/data/art/WASHBR08.ART)

There's a free copy of "Il Milione" somewhere on the web but I've not got the bookmark on this computer.
Would a Japanese call a foreigner gaijin to his face? Since they do it today, there is no reason to think that they didn't do it in the past. The word gainjin (literally "outside person") is not in and of itself perjorative. A lot has to do with context. Many speakers will use gainjin san or gaijin sama to ensure politeness.This is an attitude found all over Asia in fact. Languages there allow one to recognise difference without any value statement being associated. For example, go to Lahore, Pakistan for example and you can go visit the "Gorrha Kabistan" (sp?), as it's known in Urdu. This basically means "White Man's Cemetery." But it's just the name people use for the Christian cemetery there. No big value statement associated with the name.

Interesting how there is a lack of polite acknowledgement of difference in the West. What options are there in the English language for calling someone an "outside person" and saying you're going to the "white man's cemetery" without sounding like a racist and/or patriotic nutjob? Not many.
I'm typing this on a Fujitsu computer - does that mean I'm "easternised"?What's hilarious is how much time and anxiety is spent banging on about "westernisation", both today and demonstrated through the actions of the Japanese rulers mentioned above. These are inevitable dynamics and creep up as quite distractionary political issues at that. Proper red herrings, for leaders in need of a scape goats and / or smoke screens. Worked for them in Medieval Zimpangu, works for our leaders today.

[Oda] I hadn't heard of him - interesting story. If the Japanese authorities were being fed the views of typical Englishmen about Catholicism, then that would go some way towards explaining why they took against it.

Typical Englishmen is bad enough. Typical englishment who grew up during the heydays of the Philipo-Elizabethan conflict, served under Drake in the 1588 campaign, and was welcomed in Japan by Jesuits urging the locals to crucify him as a pirate is much, much worse ;)

Of course, had the quite serious 19th c. suggestion that the Japanese should entirely drop their own langauge and one and all adopt English instead been implemented, then we would have been talking of something else altogether.:)

I was just as shocked reading that as I was when I learned that the Chinese were considering making Esperanto their national language.

Thank God both never happened.

Any links on that?

Takhisis: You call the place "Nippon".

"Nippon" (and its alternative reading "Nihon") are what the Japanese call Japan. The people are "Nipponjin" or "Nihonjin" and the language is "Nihongo."

"Nippon" (and its alternative reading "Nihon") are what the Japanese call Japan. The people are "Nipponjin" or "Nihonjin" and the language is "Nihongo."
"
"Land of the Rising Sun" if memory serves me right. That is why Japan's flag is also a rising sun, no?

Though the actual Kanji used to represent Japan stands for "Root" and "Sun" respectively, if I remember anything from my Japanesse classes.

"Nippon" (and its alternative reading "Nihon") are what the Japanese call Japan. The people are "Nipponjin" or "Nihonjin" and the language is "Nihongo."Thanks! I didn't know about the name of the language. I just wanted to clarify that neither Nippon, Nihon, nor Japan was the European name for this land for quite some time. Vaguely important given the amount of, yes, I'm just gonna say it, Eurocentric histories on the subject. I hope that was clear. :)

Just wanted to pick up again on the note about language and outsiders. Can someone please clarify the expression we hear being used in China: "Foreign Devils". It isn't just in James Clavell books that we people on the other side of the world, not subject to Chinese culture, see it being used. Where does it come from and what meaning does it have to those who use it? Are we to take it at face value?

I think that term was widely used during the late 19th century and early 20th century - the time of Chinese weakness and multiple foreign concessions in cities like Shanghai and Tsingtao etc. Certainly no Mandarin speaker today uses "waiguo guizi" (foreign devil) today. Even I feel absurd translating it.

The Cantonese term "gwailo" simply means "devil". How it came to be associated with foreigners is beyond me. Today however that can even be a term of endearment depending on how it's used. :lol:

As for the Hokkien "angmoh" (used also in Singapore) it literally means "red hair". I guess that's what stuck in their minds when they saw their first Westerner all those centuries ago, and the name stuck. :D

Thanks Dann. :goodjob: And sorry to make you feel absurd, I've just wondered about that for a while.

I'm now wondering what kind of "devil" such terms could refer to. "The" Devil, a demon, a mischievious little thing, a person of malicious intent...?
As for the Hokkien "angmoh" (used also in Singapore) it literally means "red hair". I guess that's what stuck in their minds when they saw their first Westerner all those centuries ago, and the name stuck.You mean those intrepid Scots got us all called "red hair". WTF??! :gripe: :lol:

...The Cantonese term "gwailo" simply means "devil". ...
Raymond E Feist has a small monkey like race living with the elves called "Gwailo", I think I know where he found the word. :)

@Ram: I always knew you had red hair at heart. :mischief:

@Ram: I always knew you had red hair at heart. :mischief:OK, I'm rumbled.

But it's not at my heart you know. ;)

OK, I'm rumbled.

But it's not at my heart you know. ;)
I know that too, but this forum is PG13 you know. :mischief:

Foreign devils? Isn´t it supposed to be "quai loh" in Canton? :confused:

Yes. "quai loh", "gwailo", "gweilo" etc. all are but Roman alphabet approximations of the way Cantonese say it. No one can get it down to the exact sound.

The literal meaning is "old ghost/devil". How it came to be associated and then later become an exclusive term for foreigners is lost in the mists of time.

Certainly no Mandarin speaker today uses "waiguo guizi" (foreign devil) today. Even I feel absurd translating it.It might not be a direct translation, but i know there are people who calls the Westerners "Yang Guizi" which translates more proparely as (Sea Devils). In Singapore caucasians are also called "La Gao" which means monkey, basically, Hokkiens have no nice sweet words to decribe anyone, including themselves.

Oh yeah, I forgot about 洋鬼子. http://209.85.12.231/2135/53/emo/doh.gif These days the prevalence of PC-ness means the term is rarely used too. Mostly it's just used as part of another term: 假洋鬼子 (Jia Yang Guizi) meaning "Wannabe foreigner", a derogatory term to describe local Chinese who seek to imitate foreign ways, package themselves as non-Chinese and actually work for the interests of foreigners.

I don't count because I'm a foreigner in the first place. :p
basically, Hokkiens have no nice sweet words to decribe anyone, including themselves.
Come to think of it, you're right. Se Huan, Oh Huan, Huan Na, Keng Tang Nga, Tai Diok Ah.... Not one of them is polite! :ack: About the only polite one I can think of is Lan Nang (our people), used to describe fellow Hokkien.

"
"Land of the Rising Sun" if memory serves me right. That is why Japan's flag is also a rising sun, no?


'Land of the rising sun" is close. Literally, it means "the place where the sun rises." The rising sun flag is a military flag. The national flag is simply a red sun on a white background and is known as the "Hi no maru" (sun disc) flag.

"Nippon" (and its alternative reading "Nihon") are what the Japanese call Japan. The people are "Nipponjin" or "Nihonjin" and the language is "Nihongo."

Why do the Japanese use two names for their country?

It's only one name. Nihon and Nippon are just two different ways of latinizing (ie, representing with western letters) the Japanesse word, which is (of course) usually spelled with Japanesse symbols.

In much the same vein, you have Pekin/Beijing, Nankin/Nanjing, Canton/Guanzhou, etc.

To amplify what Oda said, it also has to do with the fact that there are alternate readings (or pronunciations) of the second of the two kanji (日本)characters which make up the name in written Japanese.

Hokkiens have no nice sweet words to decribe anyone, including themselves.

Which is precisely why Hokkien is best used for a heated argument, Cantonese to insult people, and Mandarin when you feel like being polite;)

When me and my old buddies from high school get together and start yapping in Hokkien so many expletives get thrown around the other people around us think we're having an argument. :lol: I have even observed some hurriedly call for the tab and flee, expecting a fight to break out any minute. :crazyeye:

Canton/Guanzhou, etc.

Are you sure that's not just a name that Westerners "made up". There's no way that could be from diffent Romanizations.

Actually, that should have read Canton/GuangDONG, because while the Chinesse city name is Guangzhou (or Kuang-chou per older romanizations system), the name the westerners gave to the city derived from the name of the *province* it is part of, namely, Guangdong.

Are you sure that's not just a name that Westerners "made up". There's no way that could be from diffent Romanizations.

No, Oda is correct. In fact there are many more Romanization systems of Chinese than just two. The most common are the older Wade-Giles still, I think, in use in Taiwan (Pekin, for example) and the newer Pinyin adopted by the PRC as the standard method in the 1970's (Beijing, for example). Perhaps Dann may have more info on this.

The main Romanizations are those two, so there's basically at least 2 Romanizations for every Chinese place name, plus possibly a third if the place was opened to Westerners centuries ago and the latter gave it their own name.

Thus Guangdong province (in Pinyin) can also be written in English as Kwangtung (in Wade-Giles) with no confusion at all. (Among Chinese we dispense with all this pronounciation and spelling nonsense by using characters. The reader may read it in whatever dialect or pronounciation he wishes. :D )

Guangzhou (Pinyin) aka Kuangchow (Wade-Giles) literally means "capital of Guangdong/Kwangtung". Visiting Westerners centuries ago gave it their own name: Canton. This last word is no longer used as a place name, but has left a legacy of its own. The province's dialect became known forever as Cantonese, and there are lots of dishes (like say Pancit Canton) that have become so much a part of local cuisine even in other countries of Southeast Asia that nobody even thinks about where the dish or the name came from.

There are lots of other cities that share the same situation. Fuzhou (Foochow) was once also known as Zeiton. Xiamen once had another name called Amoy. Possibly there are many others out there that I do not know of.

Interestingly, not all Western names were discarded upon the end of the concessions era. The name Harbin for example has stuck. That city is still called that name to this day. The Chinese had to use 3 characters to reproduce the sound "Ha-er-bin". (Most Chinese cities use 2 character names.)

Yes, Harbin is spelled 哈尔滨 in simplified or 哈爾濱 in traditional, or in Russian as Харбин. It was founded by the Russians if I recall correctly, and kept it's Russian name even in Chinese.

Dann - Canton isn't an "out of the blue" name. It's a french transliteration (effectively, an informal romanization, where the sailors/merchants just tried to represent what they heard as best as they could using their alphabet and pronunciation) of the province name.

I'd put money on Amoy being a similar case.

Wouldn't they write it something like Quangchow or Shiyamen? That would be closer than Canton or Amoy, which was way off?

By the way, in the case of Zaitun (Quanzhou), it's name was taken from the Arabic word for olive (زيتون) so maybe there are also similar cases for other cities.

Amoy means "tea" in the Amoy dialect.

Dann - Canton isn't an "out of the blue" name. It's a french transliteration (effectively, an informal romanization, where the sailors/merchants just tried to represent what they heard as best as they could using their alphabet and pronunciation) of the province name.

I'd put money on Amoy being a similar case.
I know it's not "out of the blue". But I don't speak French, and thus was unable to think up the correlation.

Thanks for the information. :)

In japanese, when one talks about Japan, one says 'Nippom' (Yes M, not N, the same way other N becomes M in conversational speech). Nihon is more formal, at least in Kanto. On the other hand, the long formal name of Japan is 'Nihonkoku'. Much less of a mouthful than 'chuukajinminkyouwakoku' = China.

In japanese, when one talks about Japan, one says 'Nippom' (Yes M, not N, the same way other N becomes M in conversational speech). Nihon is more formal, at least in Kanto.

I am interested in learning where you acquired the idea that it's "Nippom." I have lived a large portion of my life in Japan and am bilingual but I have never, ever heard "Nippom." As to formality, I would tend to go with Nippon since most official documents and titles use it (e.g. Nippon Hoso Kyokai, Nippon Ginko). It's even on the postage stamps and the money.

I've also never heard of Nippom. N only becomes m when followed by certain other sounds, for example Tenpura (Tempura) and Shanpuu (Shampuu).

To my understanding Nihon is the standard while Nippon is used in more formal or institutional situations such as those given by 7ronin.

I recall reading that Nippon was introduced as a more assertive nationalistic reading during Japan's militarist days. I don't know if this is legit, but it would figure with my experience. Japanese football fans chanted Nippon, Nippon.... during the world cup even though they would invariably use Nihon in regular conversation.

As to why there could ever be two readings in the first place - that is just inherent to the Japanese language - a consequence of using Chinese characters to represent an established and grammatically incompatible language. Study Japanese if you want to understand more.

As for the gaijin thing brought up earlier, it's widely used but generally understood to be rude. I've been called it behind my back but never to my face except by other foreigners. On the other hand sometimes when we go to a restaurant and some of my foreigner friends are already there, my Japanese friends will say gaijin at the door in order to be pointed to the right table. I'm not sure I entirely approve.

Gaikokujin (outside country person) is a more polite term, since you're describing my country as outside rather than me, but it's a bit formal and stilted to use in casual conversation.

I just prefer people to call me Stephen.