Japan’s Greatest Uno Reverse on China

Let's say you're on your phone watching the news where a reporter is discussing how the police have started putting advertisements in the local magazines. Whole lot of Chinese there, right? Except that wasn't really Chinese. That's right, you heard me. That was actually Japanese. Welcome to one of history's most unexpected uno reversals, where a student became the teacher and an entire language got flipped on its head. This is the story of World War One, a long time ago in a land far, far away. So over a thousand years ago, Japan was China's diligent apprentice. The very cornerstones of Japanese civilization were originally Chinese, particularly from the Tang Dynasty. Centralized government? Chinese. Legal system? Chinese. Kanji characters? Chinese. Japanese scholars would spend decades poring over Chinese classics, and the characters they studied would become the backbone of the Japanese language. Kanji. Kanji is the Japanese pronunciation of 漢字, as in Han, Chinese characters. And so, as the teapot of Chinese characters poured into the Japanese teacup, some transformed to mean different things. But those that kept their Chinese origins became what we now call Sino-Japanese vocabulary, or Kango. Kango is the Japanese pronunciation of 漢語, 漢, as in Han, Chinese, and 語, language. Even today, almost 60% of the words in Japanese dictionaries are actually still Kango. But Japan wouldn't be the borrower forever, because geopolitics works in complicated ways. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, China was battered by industrialized and modernized Western powers, particularly in the Opium Wars. That's fair enough. The Western powers had the technology and manufacturing. But what nobody saw coming was how in 1894, little old Japan, China's historical apprentice, and not some distant colonial empire, played the Uno reverse card and beat the crap out of Big Brother China in the First Sino-Japanese War. The Chinese were absolutely stunned. Hold on. When and how did Japan get so overpowered? And that's when the cultural tables turned completely. Chinese intellectuals began flocking to Japan to learn from them. Asia's millennia-long, undisputed superpower now found itself getting schooled by its former student. The Qing Dynasty first sent 13 students to Japan in 1896. Within a decade, that number exploded to over 10,000. And these weren't just any students. These were China's best and brightest, all desperate to figure out how Japan advanced so quickly while China was still stuck in the past. And where it gets really interesting is not the tech, but the language. Since the Japanese had been consistently modernizing and westernizing in the decades since the 1868 Meiji Restoration, they had already translated complex Western concepts into kanji. They created new character combinations to express these foreign ideas that China had no words for, words subsequently called hezhi hanyu or wasei kango, Japanese-made Chinese language. And the thing is, Japan's translations were a lot more elegant than China's. Take the term economics. The Chinese scholar Yan Fu had invented jixue, literally calculation study. Okay, sort of, I guess. But that sounds like math. The Japanese used jingjixue, management study. Maybe not perfect, but definitely more comprehensive. For sociology, Yan Fu created qunxue, group study. Is that the study of groups or studying in a group? The Japanese, on the other hand, called it shehuixue, society study. Big improvement there. Now, Tian's credit, those Chinese versions at least made sense. It didn't always. For telephone, the Chinese used de lu feng or virtue law wind. Why? Because it's just telephone with Chinese sounds. De lu feng, telephone. Silly, right? The Japanese, on the other hand, just called it dian hua, electric speech. Wow, so much better. Now, what about submarines? Early Chinese texts had se bo ma lin, literally, loot sudden a gate forest. More phonetic nonsense. The Japanese, qian shui ting, dive water boat, obviously. But how about romantic? China went with luo man di ke, come on, Japan. Now, they also copied the sound with roman, but those characters were lang man in Chinese, which mean wave unrestrained, as in a wave of unrestrained emotion. Not only did they capture the sound, they captured the soul. Impressive. And that's not even the worst of China's transliterations. The Chinese version of democracy, de mo ke la xi, like, what the heck is that? The Japanese version, min zhu, literally, citizen masters. No freaking contest. The Japanese weren't just translating either. They were innovating. They created the concept of zhe xue, for philosophy, combining wisdom and study. They gave us she hui zhu yi, for socialism, combining society and doctrine. They also took the characters hua, to transform, and xing, disposition, and repurposed them into suffixes to express modern philosophies. The hua suffix meant something like something-ization, and created terms like xian dai hua, modern-ization, and min zhu hua, democracy-ization. The xing suffix meant something like-ness, and allowed terms like ke neng xing, possible-ness, or possibility, and zhong yao xing, important-ness, or importance. These were more than just borrowed words. They were revolutionary tools that now allowed China to easily engage with these new concepts and ideas. And Chinese reformers embraced Japan's linguistic innovations with open arms. Yay! But not for everyone. Many critics, from top scholars to newspaper editors, accused them of polluting the nation with their absurd and nonsensical, ridiculous imitation of Japanese. The government was divided too. The high official, Zhang Zhidong, was known for getting really freaking mad whenever he saw a Japanese term and wanted to ban all of them. One time, an advisor handed him a document with the word jiankang, or health, on it. Yeah, that's Japanese too. Anyway, he threw it back at the guy, saying, Health is a Japanese term, and using it is utterly hateful. Clearly, the guy needed a major chill pill. But guess what the advisor said back to him? Term is also a Japanese term, and using it is even more hateful. Get rekt! Mingci, or term, was also Japanese. Zhang was using a Japanese term to ban Japanese terms. Good job, dude! In the end, he switched from using japan mingci, Japanese term, to japan tuhua, Japanese vernacular. Talk about a silly tantrum. Meanwhile, others tried to offer new, pure-blooded Chinese alternatives instead of just shutting down everything Japanese. Remember Yanfu, the calculation study and group study guy? Those were his weapons of the war. He came up with almost 500 alternatives. But only a handful survive today. For example, in the case of the term logic, Japan dug up the old Chinese word for reasoning, lunli. While China ended up using Yan's luoji, a technical transliteration that stuck around partly because it sounded cool, and partly because, well, it wasn't Japanese. For natural selection, Japan went with ziran taotai, nature elimination. And China went with the literal ziran xuanze, nature selection. But Yan's more epic wujingtianze, or creatures compete, heaven selects, was so good that it remains an iconic idiom today. For utopia, Japan simply used lixiangguo, or ideal country. While Yan used a literary play on words to create utobang, non-existent, reliant nation. As in, a nation built on nothing. Dang. At least in this case, China still won at poetic punch. And it actually mirrors the word's original Greek meaning. And it actually kind of sounds like utopia. Side note, in the end, Japan gave up too. And now they just call it utopia. But that's really about it. Nowadays, words like guoji, international, zhexue, philosophy, and even kexue, science, sound so obvious and natural that I bet you didn't even know they were borrowed. The fact of the matter is, in a lot of cases, Japan simply did it better. Their translations made more sense and, quite frankly, didn't sound ridiculous. They distilled western ideas into their core concepts, and then found characters that captured the soul of what those concepts actually meant. Japan's ability to modernize was just as much thanks to their technical advancement as it was to their philosophical adaptability. And so ended what I would call World War I. But just like the actual World War I, it only resulted in a temporary peace. This battle might have ended amicably. But the next one would split China in two and spark flame wars that burn to this very day. In this whole video, we watched words cross the sea between China and Japan. But once, a person made that exact crossing. A Japanese boy sailed to China at 19, climbed all the way to the top of the emperor's court, and became close friends with one of the most famous poets who ever lived. And then, his ship home vanished at sea, and that poet sat down and wrote his funeral poem while he was still alive. What actually happened to him is the story on your screen right now. Click it to watch. And until next time, Zaijian!