Japan’s Grave Error in Calling “China” Chūgoku—The Historical and International Reasons the World Still Recognizes It as “Shina”
Is it correct to call “China” “Chūgoku” (中国)?—In an essay published in the monthly Hanada Selection, Mineo Nakajima of Akita International University elucidates the serious historical and civilizational problems inherent in this designation.
While many countries around the world have historically understood China as “Shina” (支那), Japan alone established the designation “Chūgoku” through what amounted to administrative measures.
“Chūgoku” is a profoundly Sinocentric self-designation meaning “the country at the center of the world,” and our country’s adoption of it may signify an unconscious submission to a Chinese order.
In Japan, various designations, including “Morokoshi” (唐土), “Morokoshi” (モロコシ), and “Shina,” were used in earlier times, and “Shina” was also a common name in prewar newspapers, official documents, and academic circles.
After the war, however, the mistaken myth that “Shina is a derogatory term” took shape, and “Chūgoku” became dominant as discussion was stifled.
In light of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, changes in the identity of Taiwan’s inhabitants, and the reality of hegemonic expansion in Asia, the question of what to call China should be reconsidered, and it is precisely here that the root of a serious defect in Japan’s understanding of China lies—this is Nakajima’s warning.
The Grave Error of Calling China “Chūgoku”…The World Calls It “Shina”
December 1, 2024
August 15, 2020
The following is from an essay by Mineo Nakajima, president of Akita International University, entitled “The Grave Error of Calling China ‘Chūgoku,’” published in the current issue of the monthly Hanada Selection.
[WiLL (edited by Kazuyoshi Hanada), September 2006 issue]
This is an essay that must be read not only by the Japanese people but by people throughout the world.
China’s twenty-first-century form has begun to emerge quite clearly.
While internally beset by a great many social contradictions and dangers of environmental destruction, externally it is displaying a self-centered and hegemonic posture, precisely in keeping with the meaning of “Chūka” (中華), and is aggressively seeking major expansion both militarily and in international politics.
China’s stance also remained consistently intransigent during the recent adoption of the UN Security Council resolution concerning North Korea’s nuclear missiles.
It would be fair to say that the most important task in Asian international politics is how to contain and minimize the threat such a China poses to the outside world.
The role our country must play in this endeavor is substantial and weighty, but the prerequisite is that we must always maintain an independent diplomatic stance supported by accurate knowledge of China.
Here, having recently had an opportunity to examine an issue that has long concerned me—the designation “Chūgoku”—even though, as a researcher of China, I had been accustomed from the outset to treating it as a matter of course, I would like to venture to discuss it from my own standpoint.
The question of whether to call China “Chūgoku” (中国), “Shina” (支那), or “Shina” (シナ) frequently arose both before and after the war, but, as we shall examine in detail later, the designation “Chūgoku” ultimately became overwhelmingly dominant in our country through what amounted to an administrative order, and so it remains today.
Of course, although states formally exist under the names the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China, we call them “Chūgoku.”
It cannot be denied that our need to concern ourselves with this designation stems from historical circumstances and reasons peculiar to the relationship between Japan and China, which share the same written tradition and racial stock, and cannot be attributed solely to the circumstance of a “revolution” on the Chinese side, whereby China once referred to the Republic of China and today generally refers to the People’s Republic of China.
Thus, it is also undeniable that this issue belongs to a historical and cultural context different from that of calling the state named “The United States of America” Amerika or Beikoku, or calling the country officially named “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Nothern Ireland” Igirisu or Eikoku.
Why, then, do we call “China” “Chūgoku” in our country?
Is it correct to do so?
The administrative history of the designation “Chūgoku” in our country has not gone entirely undiscussed, and various opinions and controversies over whether to use “Chūgoku” (中国), “Shina” (支那), or “Shina” (シナ) have arisen among intellectuals and in connection with letters to newspapers.
The Myth of “Chūgoku”
It was Keishū Sanetō who, while arguing that “Shina” should not be used because it was a derogatory term brought about by Japan’s victory in the First Sino-Japanese War and its subsequent aggression against China, painstakingly gathered newspaper articles and other materials to introduce the controversies both before and after the war.
On the other hand, as far as I know, the polemicists who have argued most systematically in relatively recent times that “Shina” is not derogatory and should naturally be used are Toshio Takashima and Tomofusa Kure.
Despite its importance, however, the question of what to call China is generally regarded as though it had already been settled, whatever individuals’ positions or arguments may be, and it can hardly be said to be a subject of national debate.
This is presumably because the “myth” that “Chūgoku” is the natural designation has consistently prevailed, with no doubts being raised about the customary use of that name.
I myself have also called it “Chūgoku” as a matter of course until now, and have always used “Chūgoku” in my own writings.
Even in Shigeki Kaizuka’s widely read, representative general history, A History of China (three volumes, Iwanami Shinsho), the term “Shina” does not appear at all.
Against this backdrop, I have felt admiration for the way Shintarō Ishihara and Shōichi Watanabe frequently use the designation “Shina” (シナ) without hesitation, but I have not previously committed myself any further to this issue.
Nevertheless, I did include the materials to be examined here in Documentary Materials, Volume II, of the four-volume History of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, to which I devoted a great deal of time as chairman of the compilation committee during my presidency.
This time, while preparing the chronology for Seeing Through the Lies of History: 35 Points of Contention in Modern and Contemporary Japanese–Chinese History, published under my editorship in the Bunshun Shinsho series, I searched for new materials together with the chronology’s compiler, Sun Guofeng, who holds a PhD from the University of Tokyo, and recognized their importance anew.
Now that China is increasingly displaying such blatant great-power chauvinism, while the reality of the Republic of China is undergoing major change and its inhabitants themselves are increasingly identifying with “Taiwan” and as “Taiwanese,” rather than with “China” and as “Chinese,” the question of what to call China deserves renewed examination.
At the same time, it seems to me that this issue, whose reasons and causes have not been sufficiently investigated and which has generally been overlooked as entirely natural, conceals the root of an extremely serious error in our country’s understanding of China or its stance toward China.
“Shina” and “Chūgoku”
As is well known, in prewar Japan, China was generally called “Shina” (支那, read シナ).
Looking at the July 4, 1942 (Shōwa 17), issue of the Asahi Shimbun in the reduced-size edition that happens to be at hand, I find an article reporting that Hori, director of the Third Department of the Information Bureau, had delivered a broadcast entitled “British and American Machinations in Shina.”
The evening edition of the same date carried a special dispatch from Nanjing headed “The Liberation of East Asia Is the Road to Peace” at the top of its front page, together with an article by Wang Jingwei, stating: “Ahead of the fifth anniversary of the Shina Incident, Wang Jingwei, chairman of the National Government, drafted the following article entitled ‘The Shina Incident and the Greater East Asia War,’ and on the 2nd released it specifically through our newspaper to the government and people of the friendly nation of Japan.”
The July 14 issue of the same newspaper also carried an installment of “Building the Culture of a New Shina” by Wataru Masuda, who after the war became known, alongside Yoshimi Takeuchi and others, as a translator of Lu Xun’s works.
During the Second World War, instances can be found in which “Chūgoku” was used alongside “Shina,” in expressions such as “troops on the Chūgoku side” and “the people of Chūgoku,” but “Shina” was the predominant term, and before 1930 (Shōwa 5), it was used almost exclusively.
It would be fair to say that Japan had long used dynastic names such as “Tang,” “Song,” and “Qing” for what is called “Chūgoku,” but there is also a view that “Shina” came into general use from the middle of the Tokugawa period onward, when “China” began to spread worldwide (Mikinosuke Ishida).
Recently, while showing a group of my high-school classmates visiting Akita around Kakunodate, known for its samurai residences and cherry blossoms, I gained a piece of knowledge from a sign displayed outside Morokoshian (唐土庵), a confectioner popular for its celebrated morokoshi sweets, to attract customers.
It read as follows.
“In the textbook 『烏帽子於也』 used in temple schools around the Tenpō era, one of Kakunodate’s products is listed as morokoshi, written with the characters 唐 and 土.
Morokoshi was the customary name for the country of China during the Edo period.”
We may infer that around the Tenpō era (1830–43), at least the textbooks used in the temple schools of the Satake domain contained the expression “唐土,” and that “China,” which by then was the Qing state, was called Morokoshi.
If so, “唐土” and Morokoshi appear to have remained in use even in the late Tokugawa period, which is consistent with the fact that the hereditary interpreters and translators who came to Nagasaki mainly from Fujian Province were called “Tō-tsūji” (唐通事), or Tang interpreters.
When the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages was founded in Kanda-Hitotsubashi in November 1873 (Meiji 6), several members of its teaching staff came from the ranks of Nagasaki’s Tō-tsūji, and the language they taught was initially Nanjing Mandarin and soon afterward Beijing Mandarin—today’s “Chinese”—but these were called “Kango” (漢語), and the department was named the “Kango Department.”
After passing through the name “Qing Language Department,” it was not until 1913 (Taishō 2), following the disappearance of the Qing state and the birth of the Republic of China through the Xinhai Revolution, that the language and department came to be called “Shina-go” and the “Shina-go Department.”
As can also be seen here, our country used dynastic names, but it appears that by the late Tokugawa period, when China began to gain international currency as a name, the designation “Shina” was also being used quite widely.
It is said that some among the Han people preferred to use “Shina,” partly because “China” at the time was the Qing, a Manchu conquest dynasty.
“Shina,” needless to say, means China.
It is a territorial name covering the main regions of the Chinese mainland and a collective name for a kind of cultural sphere; as in its use to refer to the “eighteen provinces of Qing,” it generally did not include non-Han regions such as Mongolia, Manchuria, Tibet, and Xinjiang.
According to the broad agreement among many scholarly theories, the name “Qin” (Ts’in, pronounced “Chin”), the dynasty of Qin Shi Huang that emerged as the first unified dynasty more than 230 years before the Common Era, was altered in pronunciation by foreigners such as the ancient Indians to Cina, pronounced “Cheena,” and this may then have spread westward to become today’s China.
Other theories also exist, including one tracing the name to the ancient city of “Shina-jō” (支那城) in Yunnan Province, near the border with Burma, now Myanmar.
The conjecture that “Qin” (Ts’in, “Chin”) spread westward and changed into Thin (“Chin”), Sin (“Shin”), Cina (“Sheena”), and China (“Cheena”), eventually becoming established as China (“Chai-na”), is also persuasive in view of the fact that in the Middle and Near East, “China” is called Tsinistan in Syria and Chinistan in Iran.
It Must Not Be Called “Chūgoku”
The People’s Republic of China, established in 1949, also uses China in its official name for external purposes: its English name is People’s Republic of China.
In the case of the Republic of China, which existed before the Chinese Revolution and continues to exist in Taiwan today, the name is Republic of China.
However, calling the People’s Republic of China or the Republic of China “Chūgoku” does not mean using “Chūgoku” as an abbreviation of either the People’s Republic of China or the Republic of China.
“Chūgoku” is an old term that appears in Mencius and the Records of the Grand Historian, and it is by no means “中（華人民共和）国” or “中（華民）国.”
During the Cold War, China was sometimes called “Chūkyō” (中共), and our country’s mass media generally used “Chūkyō” until the latter half of the Shōwa 30s.
In particular, those hostile to or averse to Communist China commonly called it “Chūkyō,” but since “Chūkyō” in this case is an abbreviation for the Chinese Communist Party, it can be said that its use as an abbreviation for the party—as in the Chinese authorities’ own expression “the Third Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party”—became intermingled with the outside world’s use of it to refer to “China” as a state.
Indeed, Taiwan’s former president Lee Teng-hui also frequently says “Chūkyō,” and in this case he is, of course, referring to “China” as a state.
The Chiang Kai-shek regime that fled to Taiwan was also sometimes called “Kokufu” (国府), but in this case the name was an abbreviation for “National Government,” and after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, relations between Japan and the Republic of China were generally referred to as “Nikka” (日華).
Now, if “Chūgoku” is not an abbreviation for either the Republic of China or the People’s Republic of China, what does it mean?
Needless to say, it means “the country at the center of the world,” “the country that embodies the finest essence of the Central Plains,” and, further, “a country standing on a higher plane than the surrounding lands of barbarians—the Eastern Yi, Western Rong, Southern Man, and Northern Di”; it is nothing other than “Sinocentrism,” the ethnocentric ideology that places one’s own people at the center of the world or the universe.
If so, it is not impossible to say that our country’s current practice of calling China “Chūgoku” amounts to rushing to join a Chinese system of order grounded in Sinocentrism.
This is despite the fact that, as is clear from Prince Shōtoku’s forthright letter to Emperor Yang of Sui—“The Son of Heaven in the land where the sun rises sends a letter to the Son of Heaven in the land where the sun sets: are you well?”—the relationship between the two was, at the very least, one of equality, and that ever since, our country had not been incorporated into the Chinese World Order as a tributary state of China.
From this standpoint as well, China should not have been called “Chūgoku,” yet our country, exceptionally unlike many other countries, ended up calling China “Chūgoku” rather than “Shina.”
How did this come about?
Before answering that question, let us look, language by language, at what other countries call “China.”
The World Calls It “Shina”
In English, including American English, which can now be described as an international common language, China is certainly not called “Central Land.”
As everyone knows, it is China.
To be continued.