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Wa (Japan)

Wa
Chinese name
Chinese 倭
Korean name
Hangul 왜
Japanese name
Kana ワ (On)
やまと (Kun)

Japanese Wa (?, "Japan, Japanese", from Chinese 倭 Wō) is the oldest recorded name of Japan. Chinese, Korean, and Japanese scribes regularly wrote Wa or Yamato "Japan" with the Chinese character 倭 until the 8th century, when the Japanese replaced it with "harmony, peace, balance."

The earliest textual references to Japan are in Chinese classic texts. Within the official Chinese dynastic Twenty-Four Histories, Japan is mentioned among the so-called Dongyi 東夷 "Eastern Barbarians". Note that the following texts are chronologically ordered by date of compilation, which does not always correspond with the sequence of Dynasties in Chinese history. In traditional Chinese units of measurement, distance is recorded in lǐ , which varied among dynastic standards, roughly equivalent to 300–400 meters. Ryūsaku Tsunoda (1951:4) cautions that great distances in thousands of lǐ "are, of course, not to be taken literally."

The historian Wang Zhenping summarizes Wo contacts with the Han State.

When chieftains of various Wo tribes contacted authorities at Lelang, a Chinese commandery established in northern Korea in 108 B.C. by the Western Han court, they sought to benefit themselves by initiating contact. In A.D. 57, the first Wo ambassador arrived at the capital of the Eastern Han court (25-220); the second came in 107.

Wo diplomats, however, never called on China on a regular basis. A chronology of Japan-China relations from the first to the ninth centuries reveals this irregularity in the visits of Japanese ambassadors to China. There were periods of frequent contacts as well as of lengthy intervals between contacts. This irregularity clearly indicated that, in its diplomacy with China, Japan set its own agenda and acted on self-interest to satisfy its own needs.


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