Gaijin - Etymology and History

Etymology and History

The word gaijin is of ancient provenance and was initially not applied to foreigners. It can be traced in writing back to Heike Monogatari, written early in the 13th century:

外人もなき所に兵具をとゝのへ

Assembling arms where there are no gaijin

Here, gaijin is used to refer to outsiders and potential enemies. Another early reference is in Renri Hishō (c. 1349) by Nijō Yoshimoto, where it is used to refer to a (Japanese) person who is a stranger, not a friend. The Noh play, Kurama tengu also has a dialog where a servant objects to the appearance of a traveling monk:

源平両家の童形たちのおのおのござ候ふに、かやうの外人は然るべからず候

A gaijin doesn't belong here, where children from the Genji and Heike families are playing.

Here, gaijin also means an outsider/stranger or an unknown/unfamiliar person.

Historically, the Portuguese, the first Europeans to visit Japan, were known as nanbanjin (literally "southern barbarians"). When British and Dutch adventurers such as William Adams arrived in Japan fifty years later in the early 17th century, they were usually known as kōmōjin ("red-haired people"), a term still used in Hokkien Chinese today.

When the Tokugawa shogunate was forced to open Japan to foreign contact, Westerners were commonly referred to as ijin ("different people"), a shortened form of ikokujin ("different country person") or ihōjin ("different motherland people"), terms previously used for Japanese from different feudal (that is, foreign) states. Ketō, literally meaning "hairy Tang", was (and is) used as a pejorative for Chinese and Westerners.

The word gaikokujin (外国人) is composed of gaikoku (foreign country) and jin (person), so the word literally means "foreign-country person". The term was introduced and popularized by the Meiji government (1868–1912), and this gradually replaced ijin, ikokujin and ihōjin. As the empire of Japan extended to Korea and Taiwan, the term naikokujin ("inside country people") was used to refer to nationals of other territories of the Empire of Japan. While other terms fell out of use after World War II, gaikokujin remained as the official government term for non-Japanese people. The modern word gaijin is held by some writers to be a simple contraction of gaikokujin.