Asian = Oriental, etc.

[Natalie Maynor]

Douglas Wilson wrote:

>  Whether this is derived > from a Chinese perception of Japan as an
> eastern place (near the sunrise) > or whether it is derived from a
> Japanese self-description ("descendents of > the sun goddess
> [Amaterasu]") I don't know. Any firm information available?

Here's what the American Heritage web page says:

Word History  Stamp collectors know that Nihon and Nippon on Japanese
              stamps mean Japan; what they probably don't know is that
              Nihon, Nippon, and Japan are all ultimately the same word.
              In the early part of the Chinese Tang dynasty in a.d. 670,
              to be precise, Japanese scholars who had studied Chinese
              created a new name for their country using the Chinese
              phrase for origin of the sun, sunrise, because Japan
              is located east of China. In the Chinese of the time
              (called Middle Chinese), the phrase was nzyet-pwun. To
              this the scholars added the Chinese suffix kwuk,
              country, yielding a compound nzyet-pwun-kwuk,
              sun-origin-country, land of the rising sun.  The
              consonant clusters in the word were not pronounceable
              in Old Japanese, so the form was simplified to
              Nip-pon-gu or *Ni-pon-gu, the latter developing by
              regular sound change to Ni-hon-gu. The forms Nippon
              and Nihon of today are the same as these, minus the
              country suffix.  Interestingly, the Chinese themselves
              took to calling Japan by the name that the Japanese
              had invented, and it is from the Chinese version of
              the name that English Japan is ultimately derived. In
              Mandarin Chinese, one of the forms of Chinese to
              develop from Middle Chinese, the phrase evolved to
              Rbngu, an early form of which was recorded by Marco
              Polo as Chipangu, which he would have pronounced as
              (ch-pn-g) or (sh-pn-g). The early Mandarin word was
              borrowed into Malay as Japang, which was encountered
              by Portuguese traders in Moluccas in the 16th century.
              These traders may have been the ones to bring the word
              to Europe; it is first recorded in English in 1577,
              spelled Giapan.

from: http://www.bartleby.com/61/67/J0016700.html

   --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu)