Japan (pronounced juh-pan)
(1) A
constitutional monarchy (the sovereign still styled as an emperor) on an archipelago
of islands off the east coast of Asia.
Known also as Nihon or Nippon (initial upper case); As Sea of Japan, the
part of the Pacific Ocean between Japan and mainland Asia (initial upper case).
(2) Any
of various hard, durable, black varnishes, originally from Japan and used for coating
wood, metal, or other surfaces; work varnished and figured in the Japanese
manner; the liquid used for this purpose and within the class lacquerware.
(3) As Japans,
a variety of decorative motifs or patterns derived from Asian sources, used on
English porcelain of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (initial upper
case).
(4) Of
or relating to Japan, Japans or japanning.
1570s:
From the Portuguese Japão, acquired
in Malacca from Malay (Austronesian) Japang
& Jepang, from Chinese jih pun (literally "sunrise"
and equivalent to the Japanese Nippon), the construct being jih (sun) + pun (origin). The connection
to “sunrise” is in Japan lying to the east of China and the sun rising in the
east. The earliest forms in Europe were
Marco Polo's Chipangu & Cipangu, variants of some form of
synonymous Sinitic (日本國) (nation
of Japan). The verb japan (to coat with lacquer or varnish in the manner of Japanese lacquer-work) dates from the 1680s and immediately begat the noun japanning and the verb and adjective japanned. The noun japonaiserie (art objects made in the Japanese style) was borrowed in 1896 from the French, which came to be described as japonism (an influence of Japanese art and culture on European art and design). Although the lacquers used weren't exclusively black, it was the most widely-used finish and in the West "japanned" took on the slang sense of "ordained into the priesthood".
In botany, the noun japonica was a species name from the New Latin and described a number of plants originally native to Japan, notably a species of camellia (Camellia japonica) and a sub-species of the rice Oryza sativa. The Latin form was a feminine of japonicus (Japanese, of Japan), from Japon, a variant of Japan with a vowel closer to the Japanese name. The adjective Japanese (Iapones) was known in the 1580s and by circa 1600 was a noun, the meaning extending to "the Japanese language" by 1828. The remarkably destructive Japanese beetle was documented in 1919, the species accidentally introduced to the US in larval stage in a shipment of Japanese iris unloaded in the port of Los Angeles in 1916. Japlish (unidiomatic English in Japan) dates from 1960s and describes the often ad-hoc linguistic code-switching on the model of Spanglish.
Queen Anne English japanned writing bureau desk with claw & ball feet, circa 1790s.The
sense of the process of “costing with lacquer or varnish" in the manner of
Japanese lacquer-work, is from the 1680s, the derived forms being japanned & japanning, hence also the French creation of japonaiserie (1896), adopted also, japanned furniture being almost always black, in the slang sense of
"ordained into the priesthood". The association in Europe of black being the color of the the garb of the lower orders of
Roman Catholic clergy wasn’t universal but sufficient prevalent for it to be
the general motif in the depiction of the breed. Adolf Hitler, a lapsed Catholic who extended the Church a
grudging admiration as an institution which had lasted two-thousand odd years
and still exerted a pull over many aspects of peoples’ lives with which the Nazi
Party couldn’t compete, called the priests “those black crows”.
French Louis XVI japanned & ormolu Sevres porcelain writing desk circa 1860.The
adjective Japanesque is attested from 1853.
It developed on both sides of the Atlantic to refer both to the aesthetic
inspired by Japanese influence and (a little superfluously) original items from
Japan. The greater awareness after 1853 followed US Navy Commodore Matthew Perry (1794–1858) sailing that year to Japan to secure the opening to American trade, by
negotiation if possible and through gunboat diplomacy if not. The aim of US policy was to end the
two-hundred and fifty years of national seclusion by Japan;
without access to Japan and its markets, the US penetration into east-Asia
really wasn’t possible. The motives of
the US were a mixture of commercial hunger and the missionary instincts of
those anxious to bring (ie impose) the influences of Christianity and
the western way of life and since 1853,
the project has played-out with ups and downs for both sides. The notion of the Japanesque was applied to a
variety of objects including ceramics, lace, painting, carving and metalwork and was not of necessity associated with the lacquering process. Japanese was noted as an adjective in the
1580s though may have been used earlier, in parallel with “Japan”. As a noun, the first use seems to have been
in 1828 in the context of “the Japanese language”. Japlish, the noun meaning “unidiomatic
English in Japan" was first noted in 1960 reflecting (1) the intrusion of
US English words and phrases into the language proper and (2) a
hybridised form of the language combining both although, despite the post-war
years of US occupation, the English influence on Japanese was less than on many
languages. One obscure curiosity from
1819 was camellia, a Modern Latin
feminised variant of japonicus (Japanese,
of Japan), from Japon, a variant of
Japan with a vowel closer to the Japanese name.
Lindsay Lohan, Japanese-edition magazine covers.
Giapan was first attested in English in Richard
Willes's The History of Travayle in the
West and East Indies (1577) in which was mentioned a translation of a
letter written in 1565 which spoke of the “Ilande of Giapan”. Like the modern Japan, Japonia was derived from the Portuguese Japão, from the Malay Jepang,
from the Sinitic (日本), probably from an earlier stage of the modern
Cantonese 日本 (Jat6-bun2) or Min Nan (日本) (Ji̍t-pún),
from the Middle Chinese 日本 (Nyit-pwón,
literally “origin of the sun”). Related
were the Mandarin 日本 (Rìběn),
the Japanese 日本 (Nippon,
Nihon), the Korean 일본 (Ilbon)
and the Vietnamese Nhật Bản.
These
notes are very much an Eurocentric scratch of the etymological surface. Japan is the exonym
(an external name for a place, people or language used by foreigners instead of
the native-language version) familiar to most and exonyms are not uncommon but
the history of the names used to describe the construct of Japan is longer and with
more forks than most. Indeed, even
within Japan, the debate about the use of Nippon, Nihon and Japan is
multi-faceted and tied to influences social, political and historical, the arguments
sometimes part of debates about the role of nationalism.
