Mineo Nakajima examines why Japan calls China “Chūgoku,” tracing the historical terms Shina and Morokoshi, the origins of the word China, the People’s Republic and Republic of China, Sinocentrism, and the implications of terminology for Japan’s perception of China.

August 15, 2020.
The following is an excerpt from an essay by Mineo Nakajima entitled “The Grave Error of Calling China ‘Chūgoku.’”
The essay originally appeared in the September 2006 issue of WiLL, edited under the responsibility of Yoshiko Hanada, and was later included in a Hanada Selection.
Nakajima’s subject is not merely a question of vocabulary.
Why did Japan come to use the term “Chūgoku” as its ordinary name for China?
Is “Chūgoku” simply an abbreviation of the People’s Republic of China or the Republic of China?
How were such historical terms as Shina, Morokoshi, and Kango used in Japan?
And what consequences may have followed from Japan’s unquestioning acceptance of the term “Chūgoku,” a word historically connected with the idea of a central realm, for Japan’s perception of China and its diplomatic posture toward it?
Nakajima explicitly acknowledges that, as a scholar of China, he himself had long used “Chūgoku” as a matter of course, before reconsidering the historical and cultural implications of that usage.
The following is from an essay by Mineo Nakajima, President of Akita International University, entitled “The Grave Error of Calling China ‘Chūgoku,’” published in a Hanada Selection then on sale. [WiLL, September 2006, edited under the responsibility of Yoshiko Hanada]
This is an essay that should be read not only by the Japanese people but by people throughout the world.
The shape that China will take in the twenty-first century has begun to emerge with considerable clarity.
Internally, it carries numerous social contradictions and the danger of environmental destruction; externally, however, it displays a self-centered and hegemonic posture that, in Nakajima’s formulation, reflects the very meaning of Zhonghua—the “Central” or “Chinese” realm—while seeking major expansion both militarily and in international politics.
China’s position was consistently uncompromising during the adoption of the recent United Nations Security Council resolution concerning North Korea’s nuclear missiles.
How the threat that such a China presents to the outside world should be contained and minimized may well be described as one of the most important issues in Asian international politics.
Japan therefore has a large and weighty role to play, but a prerequisite for doing so is that it must always maintain an independent diplomatic posture grounded in accurate knowledge of China.
As a scholar of China, I had from the outset become accustomed to something that seemed an unquestioned premise, yet one issue had long troubled me: the question of the name “Chūgoku.”
Recently I had an opportunity to reconsider it, and I would therefore like to discuss the issue deliberately from my own standpoint.
The question of whether China should be called “Chūgoku,” “Shina,” or “Sina” in Japanese arose repeatedly both before and after the war.
As we shall examine in detail later, however, the term “Chūgoku” ultimately became overwhelmingly dominant in Japan in something resembling an administrative directive, and it has remained so to this day.
Of course, although states formally bearing the names People’s Republic of China and Republic of China exist, they are referred to in Japanese simply as “Chūgoku.”
There are historical circumstances and reasons unique to Japan-China relations, involving countries that share a long cultural and textual tradition, which cannot be reduced merely to the revolutionary circumstance that “China” once meant the Republic of China and today generally means the People’s Republic of China.
The problem therefore exists in a historical and cultural context different from calling the United States of America “America” or Beikoku in Japanese, or calling the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland “Britain” or Eikoku.
Why, then, does Japan call “China” Chūgoku?
Is that correct?
The administrative and historical circumstances surrounding the Japanese use of the term “Chūgoku” have not gone entirely undiscussed.
Various arguments and controversies have arisen among intellectuals and in newspaper letters over whether the appropriate term should be “Chūgoku,” “Shina,” or “Sina.”

The Myth of “Chūgoku”

Keishū Sanetō carefully collected and introduced newspaper articles from controversies before and after the war while arguing that “Shina” should not be used because, in his view, it had become a derogatory term through Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War and its subsequent aggression against China.
On the other hand, among those who more recently and systematically argued that “Shina” was not derogatory and should properly be used were, to the best of my knowledge, Toshio Takashima and Tomofusa Kure.
Despite its importance, however, the question of what China should be called has generally been treated as though it were already settled and can hardly be said to have become a subject of nationwide debate.
That may be because the “myth” that “Chūgoku” is self-evidently the correct term has remained overwhelmingly dominant, with almost no one questioning the customary usage.
I myself had also always called it “Chūgoku” as a matter of course and had consistently used that term in my own books.
Even in Shigeki Kaizuka’s widely read three-volume History of China, published in the Iwanami Shinsho series, the term “Shina” does not appear at all.
Against that background, I had felt respect for the fact that Shintaro Ishihara and Shoichi Watanabe would often use the term “Sina” without hesitation, but until now I had not committed myself further to this question.
However, during my years as president, I spent an enormous amount of time as chairman of the editorial committee for the four-volume History of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, and documents relevant to the issue examined here were included in the second documentary volume.
More recently, while preparing the chronology for the Bunshun Shinsho volume I edited, Seeing Through the Lies of History—Thirty-Five Issues in Modern and Contemporary Japan-China History, I searched for new documents together with the chronology’s compiler, Sun Guofeng, Ph.D. of the University of Tokyo, and became newly aware of their importance.
At a time when China is increasingly displaying an overt great-power posture, while the reality of the Republic of China has itself changed considerably and its residents increasingly identify not as “Chinese” or “people of Chūgoku” but as “Taiwanese,” the question of what China should be called deserves renewed examination.
At the same time, within this issue—whose reasons and causes have generally been overlooked as though they were perfectly self-evident—there may lie the roots of a grave error in Japan’s perception of China and in its posture toward China.

“Shina” and “Chūgoku”

As is well known, before the war Japan generally called China “Shina.”
Looking, for example, at the July 4, 1942 edition of the Asahi Shimbun that happens to be at hand, one finds an article reporting that Director Hori of the Information Bureau’s Third Department had given a broadcast entitled “British and American Maneuvering in Shina.”
The evening edition of the same date carried, at the top of its front page, a Nanjing dispatch entitled “The Liberation of East Asia Is the Road to Peace,” together with an essay by Wang Jingwei.
The paper explained that, ahead of the fifth anniversary of the China Incident, Wang, Chairman of the National Government, had written an article entitled “The China Incident and the Greater East Asia War” and had released it on the second of the month to the Japanese government and public through the newspaper.
The July 14 edition also carried a serialized article entitled “The Cultural Construction of the New Shina” by Wataru Masuda, who after the war became known alongside Yoshimi Takeuchi as a translator of Lu Xun.
During the Second World War, the term “Chūgoku” occasionally appeared in expressions such as “Chinese forces” and “the Chinese populace,” but the overwhelmingly common term was “Shina,” and before 1930 almost all usage was “Shina.”
From ancient times Japan generally used dynastic names such as Tang, Song, and Qing for what is today called China.
According to one view, however, from around the middle of the Tokugawa period, when the name “China” began to spread internationally, “Shina” also came into common Japanese use.
Recently, when a group of my high-school classmates came to Akita and I showed them around Kakunodate, famous for its samurai residences and cherry blossoms, I noticed a sign placed outside a confectionery named Morokoshian, known for its morokoshi sweets, and gained an interesting insight.
The sign read:
“Around the Tenpō era, a textbook used in temple schools listed one of Kakunodate’s products as morokoshi, written with the characters 唐土. Morokoshi was a name commonly used during the Edo period for the country now called China.”
This suggests that during the Tenpō era, 1830–1843, textbooks used at least in the temple schools of the Satake domain employed the expression 唐土, Morokoshi, for the country that was by then ruled by the Qing dynasty.
If so, Morokoshi and 唐土 appear to have remained in use even toward the end of the Tokugawa period.
This also accords with the fact that the hereditary interpreters and translators who came to Nagasaki, mainly from Fujian, were known as Tō-tsūji, “Tang interpreters.”
When the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages was founded at Kanda Hitotsubashi in November 1873, several members of its faculty came from the Nagasaki tradition of Tang interpreters.
The language they initially taught was Nanjing Mandarin and soon afterward Beijing Mandarin—what is now called Chinese—but it was referred to as Kango, the “Han language,” and the department was called the Department of Kango.
After passing through the designation “Qing Language Department,” it became the “Shina Language” and “Shina Language Department” only in 1913, after the Xinhai Revolution had ended the Qing dynasty and brought the Republic of China into existence.
As these examples show, Japan traditionally referred to the country by the name of its ruling dynasty, although by the late Tokugawa period, when “China” had become internationally current, the term “Shina” also appears to have been widely used.
Because the China of the period was the Qing, a conquest dynasty of the Manchus, some Han Chinese themselves are said to have preferred the term “Shina.”
“Shina,” needless to say, refers to China.
It was a geographical name covering the principal regions of the Chinese mainland and, in a sense, a collective term for a cultural sphere.
As when it was applied to the “Eighteen Provinces of the Qing,” it generally did not include non-Han regions such as Mongolia, Manchuria, Tibet, and Xinjiang.
Most theories broadly agree that the word ultimately derives from the Qin dynasty: the “Qin” of Qin Shi Huang, whose unified dynasty arose more than two centuries before Christ, was pronounced in altered forms such as Cina by ancient Indians and other foreigners and, moving westward, eventually developed into the modern word “China.”
There are other theories as well, including one that derives it from an ancient place called “Shina Castle” in Yunnan Province near the border with Burma, now Myanmar.
The idea that Qin, Ts’in, moved westward through forms such as Thin, Sin, Cina, and eventually China also appears persuasive in light of names such as Tsinistan in Syria and Chinistan in Iran.

China Should Not Be Called “Chūgoku”

The People’s Republic of China, established in 1949, itself uses “China” as part of its official external name: People’s Republic of China.
The Republic of China, which existed before the Chinese Revolution and continues today in Taiwan, is officially Republic of China.
However, when the People’s Republic of China or the Republic of China is called “Chūgoku” in Japanese, “Chūgoku” is not simply an abbreviation of either formal name.
“Chūgoku” is an ancient expression found in such works as Mencius and the Records of the Grand Historian.
It is not an abbreviation created by taking characters from “People’s Republic of China” or “Republic of China.”
During the Cold War, China was sometimes called Chūkyō, literally “Chinese Communists,” and until the latter half of the Shōwa 30s—roughly the early 1960s—the Japanese mass media generally used that term.
It was especially common among those hostile to or strongly opposed to Communist China.
Because Chūkyō is also an abbreviation for the Chinese Communist Party, however, the usage of Chūkyō by Chinese authorities themselves in expressions referring to the CCP Central Committee and the external use of Chūkyō for the state called China became mixed together.
Former Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui also frequently used the term Chūkyō, in which case he was naturally referring to China as a state.
The Chiang Kai-shek government that retreated to Taiwan was also sometimes called Kokufu, an abbreviation of “National Government,” while after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, relations between Japan and the Republic of China were generally described as Nikka, “Japan–Republic of China relations.”
If “Chūgoku” is not an abbreviation of either the Republic of China or the People’s Republic of China, then what does the word mean?
It means, Nakajima argues, “the country at the center of the world,” “the finest realm of the Central Plain,” and even a country occupying a higher position than the surrounding lands characterized in traditional terminology as the Eastern Yi, Western Rong, Southern Man, and Northern Di.
In other words, he argues, it expresses the Sinocentric idea that places one’s own people at the center of the world or cosmos.
If so, Japan’s current practice of calling China “Chūgoku” could, in Nakajima’s view, be interpreted as symbolically entering the Sinocentric Chinese world order.
Yet, as shown by the famous letter attributed to Prince Shōtoku—“The Son of Heaven in the land where the sun rises sends this letter to the Son of Heaven in the land where the sun sets. Are you well?”—Japan asserted at least an equal relationship with the Sui emperor Yang.
Thereafter Japan was not incorporated as a tributary state into a Chinese world order.
From this perspective as well, Nakajima argues, Japan should not have called China “Chūgoku.”
Yet, exceptionally among many countries, Japan ultimately came to call China not “Shina” but “Chūgoku.”
How did this come about?
Before answering that question, let us first examine, language by language, what other countries call “China.”