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The story
There’s a theory that China chose the derogatory characters “邪” (evil) and “卑” (lowly) in “Yamatai” and “Himiko” to look down on Japan — but a new theory has been introduced arguing these characters were simply picked to transcribe the sounds phonetically.
On 5ch, however, pushback came fast: “If it were just about matching the sound, simple characters even a child could write would have been enough,” and “The fact that they went out of their way to pick a character meaning ‘lowly’ says it all about ancient China’s nastiness.” The discussion expanded into Sinocentrism and the derogatory names given to peripheral peoples like the Emishi and the Nanban (“southern barbarians”).
Have you ever wondered, on hearing “Yamatai” or “Himiko,” why characters with such negative meanings as “邪” (evil) and “卑” (lowly) were used? Among history buffs, it’s often said that China looked down on Japan and deliberately chose these characters. But when you examine the characters used for phonetic transcription using the ancient Chinese pronunciation dictionary Guangyun as a clue, a surprising fact emerges: “邪” and “卑” were likely chosen not to insult Japan, but simply to represent sounds. So what exactly does this mean? *This article is an excerpt, edited from the section written by Ikuya Tanaka in “Big Questions About Kanji: The World of Words You Use Every Day but Don’t Really Know,” edited by the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation (Magazine House).
(omitted)
Names like “Yamatai” and “Himiko,” which rendered Japanese proper nouns of the time in Chinese characters, deliberately used characters with negative meanings such as “邪” (evil) and “卑” (lowly). This is because of Sinocentrism (the worldview that China is the center of the world and barbarians live on its periphery) — which is why characters with such negative meanings were used.
Source: diamond.jp / Original article here
What people said
Out of all the characters that could've matched the sound, they deliberately picked the ones with bad meanings, right?
Exactly, the nastiness of ancient China deliberately using a character meaning "lowly" —
that's the whole story.
Right.
Same with "Mongol" (蒙古) —
"蒙" carries the meaning of "blind/benighted" (an old, now-discriminatory term), implying something backward and archaic.
Exactly right — if it were purely about matching sounds, they'd have used simple, low-stroke-count characters, the kind used as furigana reading aids when kids are first learning kanji.
The word for slave (奴婢, nuhi) already existed back then, so the "seikou" (生口, the people sent as tribute) seem to have been more like laborers or servants. That said, it was human trafficking, no argument there.
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Japan's adaptation of Sinocentrism ("Little Sinocentrism")
Ancient Japan (the Yamato court) applied China's worldview — "the emperor is the center of the world and rules over the uncivilized peripheral peoples" — to the Japanese archipelago. This is called "Little Sinocentrism" or "Japanese-style Sinocentrism."
The derogatory term "Emishi" (毛人, "hairy people"): copying how China labeled surrounding peoples with characters like "東夷" (eastern barbarians) and "北狄" (northern barbarians), the Yamato court called the people of the Tohoku region who wouldn't submit to it "毛人" or "蝦夷" (Emishi), casting them as culturally backward.
The idea of "civilizing imperial rule" (王化, oka): it was held to be righteous for the emperor's virtue (superior culture and etiquette) to civilize and subjugate these peripheral "uncivilized people."
That's right.
Kyoto's "rakuchu/rakugai" (inside/outside the capital) distinction is Sinocentrism too.
Calling the Jomon people "i" (夷, barbarian) was Sinocentrism.
Calling Westerners "Nanban" (southern barbarians) was Sinocentrism too.
To begin with, Kyoto's cityscape was modeled on China's Luoyang, and the "洛" (raku) you hear in terms like rakuchu and rakunan comes straight from Luoyang's "洛."
Kyoto people have a pretty strong streak of Sinocentrism themselves.
Knowing Re: #1, they'd probably spin "ban" (蛮, barbarian) as positive too — "just a coincidence," they'd say.
Meanwhile Japan was off chasing mammoths and eating them.
Yeah, it's kind of embarrassing when you think about it —
everything civilized came over from China and Korea, after all.
If you're going to say that, you could call basically any country dumb by that logic.
Paper money, the compass, paper itself, printing, gunpowder — they all actually originated on the Chinese mainland.
Most of it came from the Han Chinese.
But yeah, in Himiko's era, mainland China probably was more advanced.
Still, by the 6th century, in the reign of Empress Suiko (a female emperor), Japan declared that the Chinese emperor and the Japanese emperor were equals.
A few hundred years after that, Japan decided there was no point going to China anymore and abolished the kentoshi (envoy missions to Tang China).
So maybe Japan's been on top ever since.
Writing (kanji) had only just been introduced to Wa (Japan), so they sent off a "state letter" pretty casually…
and ended up angering Emperor Yang of Sui. After that they were too scared to send envoys for a while.
So they just pretended the reply letter had been lost.
Guess they've always been thin-skinned.
There's a theory that "委" — the character "倭" with the "person" radical dropped — was used to mark the Wa as something less than human.
He could get his hands on pretty much anything in the world already.
Was there anything from Japan at the time actually good enough to present to a superior?
Maybe the point wasn't the gift itself, however trivial, but the act of offering tribute at all —
a show of submission.
4 male "seikou" (生口, tribute laborers)
6 female "seikou"
2 bolts, 2 jo of speckled cloth
People, basically — the main tribute was essentially something close to slaves.
Probably nothing much worth mentioning.
It probably wasn't until the cupellation method (haifuki-hō) arrived from Korea and Japan started exporting silver to China that things changed. By the 17th century, Japanese-produced silver apparently accounted for a quarter to a third of world output.
they didn't even regard the surrounding peoples as human.
But "倭" (Wa) does have the "person" radical attached to it.
There's a theory that "委" meant something like "shorty."
Even "Wei" (魏, the Chinese kingdom's name) is "oni" (鬼, demon) plus "委" — that looks like a far worse character than "Wa."
"Oni" (鬼) isn't necessarily a bad meaning —
it's just something to be feared/revered.
Treating another people as human at all was a big deal in itself.
And on top of that, giving them the very same character "委" —
that's practically gold-seal-level treatment, honestly.
I asked an AI, and apparently "Wei" (魏) isn't a bad meaning —
since its radical is "oni" (鬼, ghost/demon), that side of the meaning is supposedly the stronger one.
Using "oni" in a positive sense is a uniquely Japanese thing.
In China it only ever has a negative meaning.
That's why they say things like "Riben guizi" (日本鬼子, "Japanese devil").
Originally it expressed dignity and grandeur.
Otherwise, why would they use it as the name of a kingdom?
In Japan the image is a musclebound guy with an iron club wearing a tiger-skin loincloth, but apparently in China the image is more like a ghost or specter.
With "鬼子" (guizi) it apparently carries the nuance of being some kind of monster, not the same as a human.
Probably closer to the nuance of a goblin or an orc.
carries meanings like "short" and "submissive" —
so, well, you can figure it out.
Xianbei, Xiongnu, Yamatai and Himiko —
given names like that, there must have actually been something distinctive about them, even from their point of view, back then,
in actual Japan.
Surely it's about time we reached a proper scientific conclusion on this.
Chinese people have always been big, historically — Lü Bu, Guan Yu, Xiang Yu, Wang Qi…
Maybe it's because, being connected by land, western blood got mixed in too.
Re: #157
That's why I'm saying, think about why "倭" has the "person" radical in it.
And on top of that, they were given the very same "委" character as in "Wei."
"Submissive" meant something different back then — it carried the sense of being "gentle and courteous."
Background and Key Points
The names “Yamatai” (邪馬台国) and “Himiko” (卑弥呼) come from the “Wajinden” section of the Chinese chronicle Sanguozhi (Records of the Three Kingdoms, compiled ~3rd century CE), the earliest written account of the Wa people who inhabited the Japanese archipelago before Japan had its own writing system. Because the Wa left no records of their own, every proper noun survives only in the form Chinese scribes chose to write it. That mattered because China’s worldview was explicitly Sinocentric: peripheral peoples were routinely labeled with dehumanizing terms like 東夷 (eastern barbarians), 北狄, 南蛮, and 西戎, and Japan itself was later called “Wa” (倭), a character carrying connotations of shortness or submissiveness.
The thread’s actual fault line isn’t over whether Sinocentrism existed — everyone agrees it did — but over intent in this specific case: did scribes deliberately reach for insulting characters (邪=”evil,” 卑=”lowly”) to belittle Yamatai and Himiko, or did they simply grab whatever characters matched the sound, per the article’s phonetic-reconstruction argument using the Guangyun rhyme dictionary? Posters largely rejected the “just phonetics” reading, noting that plenty of neutral, simple-stroke characters shared those same sounds, so the choice still reads as pointed.
What the thread never addresses is a dating problem: Guangyun is a Song-dynasty compilation from roughly 1,000 years after the Wei-era transcriptions were made, so using it to reconstruct 3rd-century pronunciation is itself an approximation, not hard proof of phonetic intent either way — the debate may be unresolvable with the evidence actually cited.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “[History] Did China Look Down on Yamatai and Himiko? The Surprising Reason Behind the Choice of “邪” and “卑”.”
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