Gaijin
The Japanese word gaijin ( Japanese 外人 / が い じ ん , literally: “man from outside”, obs .: “outsider”) is a negative one in contrast to the formal gaikokujin ( 外国人 / が い こ く じ ん , “person from abroad”) Denotation burdened with connotations for non-Japanese, especially western foreigners, which is meanwhile avoided by the media and is also disappearing in everyday language. The word can be used in an ethnic sense as well as to denote another nationality .
Historical background
Historically, gaijin is not a contraction of gaikokujin . The oldest evidence for the word gaijin , which was adopted from Chinese, can be found in texts from the Heian period . Up until the early modern period, it was used to describe people who did not belong to the family, to the local community, who were foreign, and who were occasionally perceived as a threat.
According to the “ Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam ” printed by Portuguese Jesuits in Nagasaki in 1603 , “Guaijin” semantically also included people from other countries, but since the 16th century a number of specific concepts have been used based on Sinocentric concepts for Europeans perceived as alien Terms such as “southern barbarians” ( nambanjin ), “redheads” ( kōmōjin or kōmō ) or “red barbarians” ( kōmōi or kōi ). These were replaced in the course of the opening of the country towards the end of the Edo period by ijin ("other or different person"), ihōjin ("person from another region") or ikokujin ("person from another country"). The form gaikokujin became popular in the 1860s . After 1872 this was used in official documents by the new Meiji government. At the same time, the term naikokujin ("man from the inland") was created to denote non-Japanese ethnic groups within the rapidly expanding territory (see: Taiwan under Japanese rule , Korea under Japanese rule ).
Most of these terms disappeared from common parlance after the Second World War. Nambanjin and kōmōjin are used today as technical terms in historiography; The former has in the meantime even acquired a romanticizing connotation in everyday Japanese through the souvenir and arts and crafts. With the increase in the foreign resident population in Japan, awareness of the slightly pejorative overtone of gaijin also increased among the locals . Various incidents and processes accelerated this process. The term still appears today in publications by Western authors - mostly to indicate the exposed position of Western foreigners in Japan.
See also
swell
- ↑ Edwin O. Reischauer: Japan: the Story of a Nation . Alfred A. Knopf, 1981, p. 255.
- ↑ Endymion Wilkinson: Japan versus Europe: a History of Misunderstanding . Penguin Books, London 1980, p. 126.
- ↑ List of Radio and Print Media Prohibited Words (Japanese)
- ↑ Nihon kokugo daijiten . Shogakukan, 2000-2002. Some versions of the classic set of characters Setsuyōshū , edited in the 16th century, replace the second character 人 (human) with the identical 仁 (humanity) and write gaijin as 外 仁 .
- ↑ Cf. also Georg Simmel's "Excursus on the Stranger" (1908)
- ↑ The case of the US-born Japanese citizen Debito Arudou and his family, who was denied access to a thermal bath in Otaru ( Hokkaidō ), caused a great stir . Arudo and two other plaintiffs brought a lawsuit to the Supreme Court , in which the operator of the thermal baths was sentenced to pay damages of one million yen (approx. 8,000 euros) to each of the plaintiffs.
- ↑ See e.g. B. Martin B. Stanzeleit: Curious about Japan: Discoveries and experiences of a Gaijin in the land of the rising sun. Wiesenburg, 2013, pp. 32–36.