Abstract
1585 still records their presence in Rome.Those first few decades when the Spanish and Portuguese dominated European activities in the Orient brought new ideas and items which many Japanese people adopted with enthusiasm: Christianity to begin with, and in addition new foods, clothes, and weapons in the shape of firearms.Some things now regarded as "traditionally Japanese"-tempura, kasutera cake, the Ponto-cho area of Kyoto, and so on-actually reflect the influence of the "southern barbarians" (nanbanjin) as the visitors were known, since they had arrived from the south, where Spain and Portugal had already set up trading posts.The missionaries also introduced a type of Western Higher Education: seminaries to train Japanese priests in the liberal arts as well as theology.Four centuries later in the 21st century, the "southern barbarians" remain familiar only in the name of a dish of fried chicken (chikin nanban)-though of course Jochi (Sophia) and Nanzan Universities in Tokyo and Nagoya respectively continue the long-interrupted presence of the Roman Catholic church.For Japanese people now, the global role not of Latin but of the English language, which is used worldwide in their daily activities by more non-native than native speakers, tends to make the concept and the word "foreign" synonymous with "English" or "Anglophone." This is the case with HE in Japan, where the foreign-influenced universities that date back to the Meiji period, and have survived, all came with close connections to the US or, to a lesser extent, Great Britain.From the 1860s, English rapidly took over the role of leading foreign (i.e., European) language from Dutch, which had held a monopoly since the 1630s, when Spanish and Portuguese withdrew after a presence of nine decades.In this book, Chapter 1 reviews some of those early footholds by Christian organizations, while Chapter 7 reveals further developments in their evolution.Now, items of vocabulary from those early times have survived as relics in Japanese in katakana form, but the days when they were primary languages for international communication in Japan are long gone.Indeed, many ordinary Japanese people will not be aware of the unexpectedly polyglot origins of some of the loanwords that they use daily, and may simply assume that they all come from English.The word kōhī, for example, resembles the English "coffee" well enough, once the limitations of transcription to the katakana syllabary are understood, but the drink reached Japan many years before any English influence, and the spoken word is based on the Dutch koffie-though the kanji characters that are used should strictly speaking be read kahi, which suggests a Spanish or Portuguese derivation.Japanese buriki for "tin" reflects Dutch blik: Dutch merchants were responsible throughout most of the Edo period for introducing many new items of simple technology.There are sometimes doublets: kirishitan and kurishichan for "Christian" from Spanish/Portuguese and English respectively; sukoppu from Dutch schop and shaberu or shoberu from English "shovel, " both meaning the same.Japanese botan for "button" does look similar to the English word, but if it were really to follow the regular rules for transcription, it would surely be "baton"; it is actually a very early borrowing from Portuguese botão .In this way, the Japanese language is surprisingly rich in non-English loanwords, reflecting a longerthan-expected tradition of "global outreach." The names of nations and major cities are sometimes taken from the English names, sometimes from that nation's language.English-based names include: Supein for Spain, not the Spanish España; Sue-den for Sweden, not the Swedish Sverige; Kopenhāgen for Copenhagen, not the Danish København.Names that reflect that nation's language rather than English include Pari from French; Itaria and Rōma from Italian; Mosukuwa from Russian; Warushawa from Polish; Myunhen from German.For a while during and after the Meiji period, the German language had a foothold in university education, especially in medical schools.Medical students who did part-time work to support themselves used the word arubaito-from the German Arbeit, for English "work"-which persists today, often abbreviated to baito.Some basic medical vocabulary in common use in Japan derives from German: gibusu (German Gips, English "plaster cast"); karute (German Karte, English "medical record"); rentogen (from the name of the German inventor Röntgen for "X-ray") and so on.Some