Departments
Intermediate Japanese - Free Online Course
GAIJIN
外人
"outsider"
Over the years, the Japanese have had a number of words to denote foreigners, and not all of them have been complimentary. The original Portuguese and Dutch visitors to Japan were called nanban 南蛮 (“southern barbarians”). Small contingents of Europeans lived in Japan during the mid-1500s through the early 1600s.
This changed in the mid-1600s, when the ruling Tokugawa shoguns banned Christianity and expelled all foreigners from the country. During Japan’s isolation years of 1639 – 1853, foreigners were forbidden to set foot in Japan. (In fact, the members of a Portuguese delegation that arrived in 1640 to negotiate trade privileges were summarily put to the sword.)
For more than two hundred years, small groups of Dutch and Chinese merchants were the only foreigners who had access to Japan. The Japanese called the Chinese tōjin 唐人, or “citizens of the Tang Dynasty.” They dubbed the Dutch ijin 異人, which might be translated as “alien.”
Foreigners in the post-Tokugawa Japan
In the late nineteenth century, Japan opened its doors to outsiders, and foreigners were no longer aliens in Japanese eyes. The word ijin was gradually replaced by ketō 毛唐 (“hairy barbarian”) in reference to the body hair of Europeans. As the word implies, this was a term of disparagement, and was often employed by ultranationalist elements who wanted to return to the isolation of the “closed country” period.
In the post-World War II years, a new slang term for foreigners came into use: gaijin 外人. Gaijin is a contraction of the standard dictionary word for foreigners, gaikokujin 外国人 (literally, “person from outside the country”). Gaijin is a slang term, but by no means a contemptuous expression. It might be compared to appellations like “Yankee” and “limey” in the English language.
Gaijin is mainly used to mean white Occidentals, although people of other ethnic backgrounds who hail from the West may occasionally be described with this word. Gaijin is generally not used in reference to visitors from Japan’s neighboring Asian countries.