Land of the Rising Sun

So I sat down and got to thinking every place has an official name and nickname right? Florida is the "Sunshine State", San Francisco "The windy city" and Italy "The boot" some places are named for more obvious reasons while some you would have to do a little research.   Japan is the "Land of the rising sun" and out of much curiosity I snooped and came up with not 1 but 2 reasons why it is called this way! Now out of all of these my favorite is the geographically correct one which if you read you will also soon know.

Okay let's begin! In Japanese, Japan is called Nihon this roughly translates into land of the rising sun but the ancient Japanese called their islands Nippo which means something like suns origin but why the change of name?   Well, during the Sui Dynasty which was a long time ago (589-618 AD) Chinese Buddhism grew very large and the number of temples and monks were enormous. With the growing of Chinese Buddhism, people in other countries like Japan came to China to study the religion which promoted the cultural exchanges between different nations.  China gave the name Nihon to the islands of Japan because from China the sun rises in their direction, and soon enough the name became popular and was adopted as the official name for the islands.  They even adapted it to their flag.   

Stealthily placed Map of Asia

That was reason number one according to the information I found now for my favorite reason number two.  If we were to look at a map we can see that Japan is the eastern most place in all of Asia.  To the ancient people of japan there was no other land to their east only the vast ocean.  Seeing nothing in that direction they believed that they were the first land awakened by the rising sun and so they were, Nippo the suns origin.  Pretty cool, huh?

A few things I should address historically, the Sui Dynasty is strictly for Chinese history for information and documentation about japan around that same time you would search about the Asuka period, which took place before, after and during the same time as the Sui Dynasty.


I hope to help someone learn a bit with this one but I must warn this information I found on the Internet and not everything on the Internet is completely accurate, so if it truly interest do your research! I am avid about getting information off books rather than the computer so I encourage you to do so. It'll be good for your brain I promise!

That being said.
~Matane