Japan in other languages: 日本 (Nippon), Tokyo and the 47 prefectures

Nippon, Rìběn, Ilbon, Japan: one written name, many readings

The two characters 日本 mean the origin of the sun. Japanese reads them Nippon or Nihon, Chinese Rìběn, Cantonese Yahtbún, Korean writes the same word in Hangul as 일본 (Ilbon) and Vietnamese says Nhật Bản. All four go back to one written form shared across the region, each read with its own sounds.

The European name came by sea. In sixteenth-century Malacca, Portuguese traders heard the Malay forms Jepang, Jipang and Jepun, and English first wrote Giapan in 1577; today Japan is the spelling of English, German, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages, and Malay still says Jepun, Indonesian Jepang. French writes Japon, Spanish Japón, Portuguese Japão, Italian Giappone and Turkish Japonya. A Latin form with the suffix of a country name, Japonia, is shared by Polish, Romanian, Basque and Albanian; Russian and twelve other languages in Cyrillic have Япония (Japonija). Latin has three names, Iaponia, Nipponia and Cipangus; the last continues Cipangu, the form Marco Polo recorded around 1300 from a Chinese pronunciation.

The capital 東京 means eastern capital, a name the city received when the imperial seat moved from Kyoto to Edo after 1868. Chinese reads the same characters as Dōngjīng, while Korean spells the Japanese sound as 도쿄 (Dokyo). Most European languages keep Tokyo or write it Tokio; Irish has Tóiceo, Portuguese Tóquio, Hungarian Tokió and Vietnamese Tô-ky-ô.

Ken, fu, to and dō: four words for a prefecture

The suffix tells the kind of prefecture. Tokyo is 東京都, Tōkyō-to, the metropolis; Hokkaidō takes 道, a circuit, as part of its name; Kyoto and Osaka are 府 (fu), urban prefectures; the other 43 are 県 (ken). In most of them the seat carries the prefecture’s name, but not everywhere: Aichi is governed from Nagoya, Gunma from Maebashi, Hyōgo from Kōbe, Mie from Tsu and Okinawa from Naha. Saitama is the one seat written in hiragana, さいたま.

ISO 3166-2 numbers the prefectures JP-01 to JP-47 after the Japanese industrial standard JIS X 0401, starting with Hokkaidō in the north and ending with Okinawa. The ISO list writes the names in the ISO 3602 romanisation, so Chiba becomes Tiba, Shizuoka Sizuoka and Fukuoka Hukuoka. The tables here use Hepburn throughout.