Is Japan correct in calling “China” Chūgoku?
In this powerful essay from Hanada Selection, Professor Mineo Nakajima reveals the historical and civilizational error behind Japan’s unique adoption of the term “Chūgoku,” a word grounded in the Sinocentric ideology meaning “the country at the center of the world.”
Historically, nations across Eurasia referred to China as “Shina,” a term derived from the Qin dynasty and unrelated to any derogatory meaning.
Japan, too, widely used “Shina,” “Karatodo,” or “Morokoshi” until the early Shōwa era, including in newspapers, academia, and government.
However, postwar political pressures and a constructed myth—“Shina is a slur”—led to the near-total dominance of “Chūgoku,” obscuring the issue from public debate.
Nakajima argues that this terminological shift concealed a deeper epistemic failure: Japan unknowingly accepted the Sinocentric worldview embedded in the term, thereby weakening its diplomatic stance at a time when the PRC is expanding militarily, politically, and ideologically.
As Taiwan strengthens its non-Chinese identity and China grows more hegemonic, Nakajima urges Japan to re-examine the naming issue—because in it lies the root of Japan’s flawed understanding of China.

Whether “Chūgoku,” “Shina,” or “Sina” should be used to refer to China has been debated before and after the war, but, as I will examine later, the term “Chūgoku” ultimately became overwhelmingly dominant in Japan through what might be called an administrative order.

Naturally, despite the existence of states whose official names include the terms “Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo” (People’s Republic of China) and “Zhonghua Minguo” (Republic of China), calling both of them “Chūgoku” cannot be attributed solely to the Chinese side’s revolutionary situation in which “China” once meant the Republic of China and today generally refers to the People’s Republic of China.

It cannot be denied that the use of that term also stems from historical circumstances and reasons unique to Sino-Japanese relations, rooted in the fact that both share a common written culture.

Therefore, unlike calling the country named “The United States of America” as “America” or “the U.S.,” or calling the country officially named “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” as “England” or “the U.K.,” the problem here exists within a distinct historical and cultural context.

Then why does Japan call “China” (Chai-na) “Chūgoku”?

And is that correct?

The administrative history of the term “Chūgoku” in Japan has been discussed previously, and debates about whether to use “Chūgoku,” “Shina,” or “Sina” were once conducted among intellectuals and in newspaper correspondence columns.

The Myth of “Chūgoku”

Sane Tokukeishū was among those who painstakingly collected newspaper articles to argue that “Shina” should not be used because it was a derogatory term born of Japan’s victory in the First Sino-Japanese War and its subsequent aggression.

On the other hand, among those who more systematically insisted in recent years that “Shina” is not a slur and should be used as a matter of course were, as far as I know, Tadao Takashima and Tomoe Go.

However, despite the significance of the issue of China’s name, it has generally been treated as though already settled, and it is hard to say that it has been a subject of national debate.

This is because the myth that “Chūgoku” is natural and unquestionably correct has dominated consistently, without people feeling any doubt about using it.

I myself had also called the country “Chūgoku” as a matter of course until now, and I have consistently used “Chūgoku” in my own writings.

Looking at China no Rekishi (History of China; upper, middle, and lower volumes) by Shigeki Kaizuka—long read as a representative general history of China—the term “Shina” does not appear at all.

Amid such circumstances, I had long respected Shintarō Ishihara and Shōichi Watanabe for using the term “Sina” without hesitation, yet I had made no further commitment to the issue myself.

However, in the second volume of documentary materials included in The History of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (four volumes), for which I served as the chair of the editorial committee during my time as university president, I had included materials relevant to this question.

Recently, when compiling the chronological table for the Bungeishunju Shinsho volume I edited, Piercing the Lies of History: 35 Contested Issues in Modern Sino-Japanese History, Sun Guofeng (Ph.D., University of Tokyo), who prepared the chart, discovered new materials, leading me to recognize their significance anew.

Given today’s situation—where the People’s Republic of China is becoming increasingly overt in its great-power nationalism, and the Republic of China on Taiwan has undergone great social changes with its inhabitants strengthening an identity not of “China/Chinese” but of “Taiwan/Taiwanese”—this issue of China’s naming should be reexamined.

At the same time, within this issue—long overlooked as something “obvious” without sufficient investigation into its reasons—the very root of Japan’s serious misconception about China, or its posture toward China, appears to be hidden.

“Shina” and “Chūgoku”

As is well known, before the war Japan generally called China “Shina.”

By chance, I have at hand the July 4, 1942 morning edition of the Asahi Shimbun (reprinted edition), which contains an article reporting that Hori, the Director-General of the Information Bureau’s Third Department, delivered a broadcast titled “British and American Maneuvers in Shina.”

In the evening edition of the same day, it reports that the National Government Chairman Wang Jingwei, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the “Shina Incident,” wrote an article titled “The Shina Incident and the Greater East Asia War,” and sent it on the 2nd through the newspaper to be presented to Japanese policymakers and the public.

The first page carries a Nanjing dispatch summarizing Wang’s article under the headline “The Liberation of East Asia Is the Path to Peace.”

In the July 14 edition, there is also a serialized article by Masuda Wataru—later known along with Takeyuchi Yoshimi as a translator of Lu Xun—titled “The New Shina’s Cultural Development.”

While the term “Chūgoku” appears occasionally during the Second World War in expressions like “Chinese military forces” or “Chinese populace,” the overwhelming majority usage was “Shina,” and before 1930 almost everything was simply “Shina.”

In Japan, from ancient times, names of dynasties such as “Tang,” “Song,” and “Qing” had been used to refer to what we now call “China.”

But after the term “China” spread internationally from the mid-Edo period, it is said that “Shina” came to be used widely (according to Mikinosuke Ishida).

Recently, when guiding my high school classmates during a tour of Akita, I noticed a signboard outside the well-known confectionery Morokoshian in Kakunodate, famous for its samurai residences and cherry blossoms, and gained a valuable insight.

The sign said:

“In the Tenpō era, the textbook Eboshioya, used in terakoya (temple schools), lists ‘Morokoshi’ (written with the characters for ‘Tang’ and ‘earth’) as one of Kakunodate’s local specialties. Morokoshi was a name for the country of China commonly used in the Edo period.”

From this it can be inferred that in the Tenpō era (1830–1843), at least in the Satake domain, “Tang-earth” and “Morokoshi” were used to refer to what was then the Qing empire.

If so, it seems that even in the late Edo period “Tang-earth” and “Morokoshi” were used, consistent with the fact that the hereditary interpreters and translators who came from Fujian to Nagasaki—called “Tōtsūji” (Tang interpreters)—were active.

When the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages was founded in November 1873 in Kanda Hitotsubashi, several of its professors were former Nagasaki “Tōtsūji,” and the language taught was initially Nanjing Mandarin, soon replaced by Beijing Mandarin (modern “Chinese”), which was called “Kango,” and the department was named the Department of Chinese Studies (“Kango Gakka”).

After passing through the stage of “Qing Language Department,” it became the Department of Shina Language in 1913, following the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the birth of the Republic of China.

As seen here, in Japan, dynasty names had long been used, and as “China” came into international use in the late Edo period, “Shina” also came into common usage.

Since the “China” of that time was the Manchu conquest dynasty of the Qing, some Han Chinese themselves preferred the term “Shina.”

“Shina” is, needless to say, simply the word “China.”

It designates the territory covering the major regions of the Chinese mainland and refers to a cultural sphere; as in the case of the “Eighteen Provinces of the Qing,” it did not include non-Han regions such as Mongolia, Manchuria, Tibet, or Xinjiang.

According to many scholarly theories, the name originated from “Qin” (Ts’in), the first unified dynasty over 230 years before the Common Era, which foreign peoples—such as ancient Indians—pronounced as “Cina,” and which later spread westward, eventually becoming “China.”

Other theories include the “Shina Castle” hypothesis, based on an ancient city in Yunnan near the present border with Myanmar.

The transformation of “Qin” (Ts’in) as it traveled west—into Thin, Sin, Cina, and eventually China—is considered persuasive, given that in Syria “China” is called “Tsinistan” and in Iran “Chinistan.”

We Must Not Call It “Chūgoku”

The People’s Republic of China, founded in 1949, uses “China” (in English) as its official international name: “People’s Republic of China.”

The Republic of China, which existed before the communist revolution and still remains in Taiwan, calls itself “Republic of China.”

However, calling either of these entities “Chūgoku” is not the same as abbreviating their official names.

“Chūgoku” is an ancient term that appears in the Mencius and Records of the Grand Historian, and it is absolutely not an abbreviation of “Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo” or “Zhonghua Minguo.”

During the Cold War, communist China was often called “Chūkyō” (the Chinese Communist regime), and Japanese media generally used “Chūkyō” until the late 1950s.

The term “Chūkyō” was widely used by those hostile to or wary of Communist China, referring to the Chinese Communist Party in the sense that the PRC itself uses—for example “Central Committee, Third Plenum of the Eighth Congress.”

Thus, “Chūkyō” referred both to the Communist Party itself and, in external usage, to “China” as a state.

Former Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui also frequently used “Chūkyō,” referring, of course, to the state known as China.

Meanwhile, the Chiang Kai-shek government that fled to Taiwan was sometimes called “Kokufu,” a contraction of “National Government,” and after the establishment of the PRC, relations between Japan and the Republic of China were referred to mainly as “Nikka” (Japan–China).

If “Chūgoku” is not an abbreviation of the Republic of China or the People’s Republic of China, what does it mean?

It means “the country at the center of the world,” “the refined country of the central plain,” and by extension, “the country on a higher plane than the surrounding barbarian lands of the East Yi, West Rong, South Man, and North Di.”

In other words, it is an expression of the ethnocentric Sinocentric worldview, the ideology of Chūka.

If that is so, Japan’s use of “Chūgoku” to refer to “China” amounts to placing itself within the Chinese hierarchical world order.

As Prince Shōtoku wrote proudly to Emperor Yang of the Sui—“The Son of Heaven in the land where the sun rises sends a letter to the Son of Heaven where the sun sets”—relations were at least equal, and Japan was never incorporated into the Chinese tributary system (the so-called “Chinese World Order”).

From this standpoint alone, Japan ought never to have called China “Chūgoku.”

Yet, contrary to many other countries, Japan ended up calling “China” not “Shina” but “Chūgoku.”

How did this happen?

Before answering this, let us examine how other countries refer to “China,” by language.

The World Calls It “Shina”

In English—today virtually a global lingua franca—“China” is not called “Central Land.”

As is well known, the term is “China.”

This article continues.