Drawing on Masayuki Takayama’s discussion of a paper by Nanjing University professor Wang Binbin, this article examines the major role Japanese-coined Chinese-character terms such as “democracy,” “revolution,” and “government” played in the formation of modern Chinese and in China’s reception of Western ideas.
It also discusses Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, Japanese-language education in Taiwan, Lee Teng-hui, and criticism directed at Ryotaro Shiba and the Asahi Shimbun’s “Tensei Jingo” column.

August 19, 2020.
The following is taken from Masayuki Takayama’s regular column appearing at the end of the issue of Shukan Shincho released today.
This essay once again demonstrates that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
It should be read not only by the Japanese people but by people throughout the world.

Japanese and Latin

Nanjing University professor Wang Binbin has written a paper on the theme, “There is an astonishing amount of Japanese in our Chinese language.”
To summarize his argument, as much as 70 percent of present-day Chinese consists of Japanese-coined Chinese-character vocabulary—in other words, words created in Japanese.
No matter how much one may dislike Japanese, the reality, he says, is that without it, “we Chinese could neither converse nor write.”
This is because “these were terms coined by the Japanese by rendering corresponding Western words in Chinese characters, and today they have firmly taken root in our language.”
“In the past, we tried to replace them with expressions of our own.
For example, we attempted to replace the Japanese term for ‘telephone’ with a phonetic rendering, but it could not compete with 電話 in clarity and eventually disappeared.”
“The only case in which we succeeded in replacing a Japanese-made term with a Chinese-made one was changing the transliteration for cholera into 霍乱.”
The author then adds a sarcastic comment about disease and national pride.
According to Wang Binbin, the influx of Japanese vocabulary into China began when Liang Qichao, who had fled to Japan after the political upheaval of 1898, translated the Japanese novel Kajin no Kigu into Chinese.
The story concerns a former Aizu samurai who, after his domain was defeated by the Satsuma and Choshu forces, travels to the United States and meets a young Chinese man there.
The Chinese youth also carries the sorrow of seeing his homeland encroached upon by the great powers and, on top of that, defeated by Japan.
The two discuss the “sorrow of small nations” and debate the nature of the state, while a beautiful woman from another weak country, Ireland, becomes involved in the story.
For Chinese readers who knew little of the wider world, the work was a fresh stimulus, and the translation became a major success.
When Liang Qichao translated it, he used Japanese-coined terms such as “democracy,” “revolution,” and “government” exactly as they were.
Chinese, the article argues, had many words for concrete things but relatively few abstract terms for concepts such as thought and states of mind.
Japanese therefore became a key that opened an entirely new world, allowing Chinese intellectuals to absorb Western culture through Japanese.
In another work, Liang recommended learning Japanese as the quickest route to acquiring knowledge of the world.
Lu Xun did much the same, translating textbooks he brought back from Japan and using them as textbooks in Chinese teacher-training schools.
The article goes on to argue that both Liang Qichao and Lu Xun regarded China as a weak or small country and felt deeply frustrated by that condition.
Japanese around them sought to encourage them by saying, “China possesses one of the world’s four great civilizations,” and that “the magnificent cultures of the Tang and Qing dynasties were without equal in the world.”
The original article then advances its own historical interpretation of the Tang and Qing dynasties and links this discussion to later ideas concerning the greatness of the Han people under Xi Jinping.
Setting that argument aside, Wang Binbin acknowledges that Japanese “saved Chinese people the trouble of mastering various foreign languages such as English, French, and German and translating the original works into Chinese, and also saved them the effort of having to invent suitable new words whenever an appropriate Chinese expression did not exist.”
In this sense, the article argues, Japanese performed for China a role comparable to that of Latin for the Germanic peoples of Europe.
This, it says, is why Japanese-derived vocabulary today accounts for such a large proportion of Chinese.
Wang concludes with the observation that whenever Chinese people speak or think about Western concepts, “the existence of Japan is forever inserted between China and the West.
When I think this far, I cannot help getting goosebumps.”
Chinese readers encountered Japanese vocabulary through Liang Qichao’s writings in 1898, and at roughly the same period Japanese was also introduced into Taiwan.
There, six Japanese teachers were assigned to teach Japanese directly at Zhishanyan.
After they were killed by armed attackers, another forty-five teachers volunteered to carry on their work.
Such efforts were followed thirty years later by the opening of Taihoku Imperial University.
Lee Teng-hui, who had recently passed away when this article was written, was also one of those who learned about the wider world through Japanese.
The article then criticizes a recent Tensei Jingo column for treating precisely this aspect of Lee’s life as a problem, through the words of Ryotaro Shiba.
Shiba met elderly Taiwanese who spoke Japanese and wrote that he felt an “indescribable sadness.”
The author criticizes Shiba for viewing modern Japan negatively and for interpreting these people simply as “Asians who were forced to use Japanese.”
Although Shiba came from the Sankei Shimbun, the author argues that his underlying outlook had long resembled that of the Asahi Shimbun.
Tensei Jingo similarly followed Shiba’s interpretation, describing Lee Teng-hui in a way that suggested sadness at “the length of the years during which Japanese had been instilled in him.”
The article concludes that Wang Binbin would surely be astonished if he read such an interpretation.