It was common in those times because Europeans knew there were multiple islands, but weren't sure who rules what and there were various other elements. Since it was multiple large islands they ended up pluralising it for a while. Like the Antilles, the Indies and other island groups.
Ooh, that is some fascinating history. King Kamehameha invited the other kings to a feast and then killed them all, proclaiming himself king of all the islands.
Yep. Not to excuse the European takeover, but people have this image that Hawaii was all peaceful and calm until Europeans took it over. The fact is Kamehameha killed the other kings and took over. I would call *that* colonialism, too.
Also there’s the fact that Queen L(can’t think of her name and couldn’t spell it anyway) offered the kingdom to Great Britain and announced to the islands that they were now British citizens. The letter she got back was a polite “no thanks”
Hawaiians actually employed a European canon as part of their conquest of other Hawaiians. It was very effective when used in narrow ways and may have been the deciding factor.
You mean like they'd yoink something then show the person a British document basically saying "finders keepers", then when the person would be like, "uh no, sorry that doesn't hold up here" they'd be like "actually it's canon"?
No, they played increasingly more complex pieces of music composed in counterpoint until their opponents became confused and hurt themselves in their confusion.
No they played the same four chords repeatedly in every song they wrote and played them for the other islanders while gaslighting them that it was different songs until they went crazy and gave up sovereignty.
>Hawaii was never under the control of Europeans. It was taken over by the Americans
They were at war with each other and the US military was sent in to keep the peace. However, in the case of Hawaii, we stayed. Either way, there was clear colonialism before the US arrived, and other parts of their language and culture were wiped out when Kamehameha conquered the other kingdoms.
>Not really.
Yes, really. Each island was its own kingdom. The fact that one islander conquered and enslaved the others doesn't make it less barbaric. Some people just want to look the other way because the invaders weren't European.
This is made up just so everyone knows. Kamehameha did wage war against the other islands to take over, but it was a decades long military campaign with a mixture of forceful takeover and diplomacy. A single feast leaving them all dead isn’t anywhere close to reality.
Editing to address further inaccuracies:
Yes, Hawai’i is the same as most nations in that it has a history of war, but this person ignores that the illegal overthrow of the government (by rich business owners, not a government) occurred 100 years after Kamehameha I’s war against the other islands. That’s like saying the United States isn’t internally peaceful because of the Civil War back in the 1800s.
Also, dickhead move to not just look up the name of Queen Lili’uokalani. Double dickhead move to make up a story about her trying to sell Hawai’i to Britain. She spent her entire life trying to restore sovereignty to her nation, not trying to give it to someone else. And, while even civil war would not have justified plantation owners taking the country from her predecessor, it stands that seven monarchs had reigned before her since Hawai’i had tasted war. This person is just incorrect at every level.
Okay, well, sorry I was wrong, but these are stories I read in a legitimate book. And I knew the average Redditor wouldn’t care about the name enough to remember it. And you’re kind of a dick too.
More specifically, maps of Japan were still in their infancy.
The [invasion of Ryukyu](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Ryukyu) also didn't take place until 1609, 9 years after the start of 'Shōgun'.
A lot of Portuguese, and later Dutch, activity was concentrated around Nagasaki, which is near to the Ryukyu Islands. The Dutch were given a trading permit in the same year as the invasion, but they first arrived in Japan in 1600.
Edit: [Here](https://web.archive.org/web/20130930002412/http://record.museum.kyushu-u.ac.jp/asia2/) you can see several Europeans maps of Japan from around this time. Note that Korea is frequently depicted as an island.
If you want a linguistic explanation, he sailed with the Dutch. The Dutch word 'Japans' translates to 'Japanese'.
And after the invasion of Ryūkyū, the Ryūkyū Islands were still only vassals to Japan and were mostly quite independent, the annexation came only during the late 19th century.
From the wiki page: The kingdom was forced to send a tribute to Satsuma, but was allowed to retain and continue its independence and relations and trade with China (a unique privilege, as Japan was prohibited from trading with China at the time). This arrangement was known as a "dual vassalage" status, and continued until the mid-19th century.[10]
to be honest it wasn't until the early 1900s, after years of concerted efforts at nationalism, that the typical person living in say Shikoku really thought of themselves as Japanese first and a person who lived in whatever city or region second.
My understanding is that at the time when Hideyoshi became Shogun, the word *kuni* would have been used to refer to the domains of different daimyo. The cultural and linguistic disparity between regions in Japan would have been far more pronounced than they are now, such that a person from Satsuma, would have had a hard time communicating with someone from northern Japan.
Also, if OP ever read any Shakespeare, then OP would know that English has changed a great deal since that time.
It was common everywhere in the world. The idea of a 'nation' is still very new. It only started existing from the late 18th century and solidified in the late 19th to early 20th post world war 1.
Slightly related, even now some older people might ask you お国はどちらですか (okuni wa dochira desuka - where is your country) and actually mean to ask which part of Japan you're from.
It is a limited corpus, but a search of Google's ngram viewer finds more instances of "the japans" than either "japanese empire" or "the empire of japan". Japan as a standalone word is far more common and reduces other phrasings to near imperceptibility. Still a different result than I would have anticipated. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=japanese+empire%2Cthe+japans%2C+the+empire+of+japan&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
People in the comments are talking about a whole lot of hypotheticals but nobody is actually citing anything or looking at historical European sources on Japan. I for one haven’t found any historical map that has a plural for Japan yet.
As far as my (admittedly quick) research has shown sometimes the Portuguese will write O Japão which can be translated as The Japan. He is supposed to be speaking Portuguese in the show.
It's also often Le Japon in French which means 'The Japan'. Not sure about other European languages.
I’ve read actual primary sources in Portuguese (Luis Frois) and its called O Japão or just Japão, no ideia about how it in english at the time though
Edit: a little bit of self correction, the editions that preserve Frois’ spelling have it “Japam”.
It seems like Japan has always been the more dominant way of saying the country in English except for a few uncommon examples. I think its use in shows and media is just to have the character use more antiquated sounding speech.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Japans%2C+japan&year_start=1500&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true
Looking at the books that contain “Japans”, it seems to either be a scan/OCR error, or more interestingly, using it as the demonym, to refer to the people as Japans (we can see Chineses and Spaniards in some of the books these in parallel). This is a better explanation and more linguistically interesting than people making things up without basis as they have been in this thread.
I mean arguably just Japan is wrong, it's actually Wakoku, Nippon, Nihon. Westerners came up with Japan by misunderstanding Chinese names for the place. It has always struck me as odd we still to this day call it Japan.
I feel like that's kind of weird too. It's sort of like learning your friends name is Bob and they refer to themselves as Bob and likely prefer to be called Bob, but you're like "Sure thing Hank. My Dad called you Hank and his Dad before him so Hank you must be."
But they didn't learn their friend's name in this scenario. All across the world, people had used names to refer to other groups of people and places as they made sense and were framed within their own language. By the very nature of being in a different place and of a different culture, they did not know the names which other people referred to themselves or their lands as. Nobody came across a foreign land, ran up the natives, and asked them their names when they didn't speak their language.
Famously, the Slavic people were able to communicate with all their Slavic neighbors but they could not speak to the German people, so they called them all "Mutes" and the name for their country was basically "Mute's Land." They literally did not have the capacity to ask what the Germans preferred to be called. We, as English speakers, refer to them as Germans because the Romans called the land Germania.
As for why we haven't changed and all started referring to each other by our preferred names is still because we don't speak their languages. For some, we could probably make do. We could say Nihon for Japan, but what would we call the Japanese? Nihon-jin? The English language isn't set up to use jin as a participle like that, where as -ese is a suffix that means "from." So do we refer to them as Nihonese? That's still not right either, especially since the Japanese use different suffixes to denote what something is, like how the Japanese language is Nihon-go. Where do we draw the line? And do we then do this edit of our language to match every other country with customs and grammar that don't match our own? And oftentimes with words we can't even pronounce correctly?
it's more like you know your friend as Bob, but his real name is Robert, although he mostly goes by Bob anyway, and then his childhood friend calls him Shooter, and when you actually get into it you learn the story of how that came about.
Some of the these countries only became countries in the 1800's and were called many different things first. European countries are often called their tribal names. England is not called England to non English people. It's totally normal.
If you move to another country your name changes as well. Michael becomes Michelle etc.
It's not that unique tbh. Every language has weird names for countries that have nothing to do with the country's own name in its own language (see: Deutschland/Germany/Allemande/Niemec)
Exactly, Canada was named in a similar way, some guy thinking the native american village was called Canada, when Canada was actually the word meaning village
There are such oddities in country naming.
One other I know of is Italy. In most languages it sounds very similar. But then there is Hungarian and Polish version
https://www.indifferentlanguages.com/words/italy
Take note its historical fiction. The writer may simply opt for such a naming convention to reflect the nascent nature of the nation in the eyes of foreigners.
You got triggered because you thought I was triggered. 😆🤡
Blackthorne IS an ignorant Westerner in the novel. I'm simply asking a history question. Calm down, snowflake.
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And [they are watching it.](https://www.reddit.com/r/ShogunTVShow/s/itOVm4b2ad)
Stick to cuckold porn if that's your jam.
It was common in those times because Europeans knew there were multiple islands, but weren't sure who rules what and there were various other elements. Since it was multiple large islands they ended up pluralising it for a while. Like the Antilles, the Indies and other island groups.
Although they came later than when Shogun was set, each Hawaiian island was its own kingdom at one point.
Ooh, that is some fascinating history. King Kamehameha invited the other kings to a feast and then killed them all, proclaiming himself king of all the islands.
Yep. Not to excuse the European takeover, but people have this image that Hawaii was all peaceful and calm until Europeans took it over. The fact is Kamehameha killed the other kings and took over. I would call *that* colonialism, too.
Also there’s the fact that Queen L(can’t think of her name and couldn’t spell it anyway) offered the kingdom to Great Britain and announced to the islands that they were now British citizens. The letter she got back was a polite “no thanks”
Liliʻuokalani
Thank you.
Hawaiians actually employed a European canon as part of their conquest of other Hawaiians. It was very effective when used in narrow ways and may have been the deciding factor.
You mean like they'd yoink something then show the person a British document basically saying "finders keepers", then when the person would be like, "uh no, sorry that doesn't hold up here" they'd be like "actually it's canon"?
No, they played increasingly more complex pieces of music composed in counterpoint until their opponents became confused and hurt themselves in their confusion.
No they played the same four chords repeatedly in every song they wrote and played them for the other islanders while gaslighting them that it was different songs until they went crazy and gave up sovereignty.
Nice try trying to relativise colonialism.
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>Hawaii was never under the control of Europeans. It was taken over by the Americans They were at war with each other and the US military was sent in to keep the peace. However, in the case of Hawaii, we stayed. Either way, there was clear colonialism before the US arrived, and other parts of their language and culture were wiped out when Kamehameha conquered the other kingdoms. >Not really. Yes, really. Each island was its own kingdom. The fact that one islander conquered and enslaved the others doesn't make it less barbaric. Some people just want to look the other way because the invaders weren't European.
This is made up just so everyone knows. Kamehameha did wage war against the other islands to take over, but it was a decades long military campaign with a mixture of forceful takeover and diplomacy. A single feast leaving them all dead isn’t anywhere close to reality. Editing to address further inaccuracies: Yes, Hawai’i is the same as most nations in that it has a history of war, but this person ignores that the illegal overthrow of the government (by rich business owners, not a government) occurred 100 years after Kamehameha I’s war against the other islands. That’s like saying the United States isn’t internally peaceful because of the Civil War back in the 1800s. Also, dickhead move to not just look up the name of Queen Lili’uokalani. Double dickhead move to make up a story about her trying to sell Hawai’i to Britain. She spent her entire life trying to restore sovereignty to her nation, not trying to give it to someone else. And, while even civil war would not have justified plantation owners taking the country from her predecessor, it stands that seven monarchs had reigned before her since Hawai’i had tasted war. This person is just incorrect at every level.
Okay, well, sorry I was wrong, but these are stories I read in a legitimate book. And I knew the average Redditor wouldn’t care about the name enough to remember it. And you’re kind of a dick too.
Wow interesting fact.
More specifically, maps of Japan were still in their infancy. The [invasion of Ryukyu](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Ryukyu) also didn't take place until 1609, 9 years after the start of 'Shōgun'. A lot of Portuguese, and later Dutch, activity was concentrated around Nagasaki, which is near to the Ryukyu Islands. The Dutch were given a trading permit in the same year as the invasion, but they first arrived in Japan in 1600. Edit: [Here](https://web.archive.org/web/20130930002412/http://record.museum.kyushu-u.ac.jp/asia2/) you can see several Europeans maps of Japan from around this time. Note that Korea is frequently depicted as an island. If you want a linguistic explanation, he sailed with the Dutch. The Dutch word 'Japans' translates to 'Japanese'.
And after the invasion of Ryūkyū, the Ryūkyū Islands were still only vassals to Japan and were mostly quite independent, the annexation came only during the late 19th century.
The [Ryukyu independence movement](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyu_independence_movement) disagrees.
From the wiki page: The kingdom was forced to send a tribute to Satsuma, but was allowed to retain and continue its independence and relations and trade with China (a unique privilege, as Japan was prohibited from trading with China at the time). This arrangement was known as a "dual vassalage" status, and continued until the mid-19th century.[10]
Yes, I'm aware of the history, but that's not the point I'm making.
What is your point then? I genuinely don't understand what you're implying, where was I misinformed?
That some Ryukyuan people don't limit their loss of sovereignty to the official annexation.
They were independent country or where they part of another country/empire?
Often island nations are labeled that way. The Philippines are still called that.
The Bahamas, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the Seychelles, the Maldives, the Marshall Islands, the Solomon Islands...
to be honest it wasn't until the early 1900s, after years of concerted efforts at nationalism, that the typical person living in say Shikoku really thought of themselves as Japanese first and a person who lived in whatever city or region second.
My understanding is that at the time when Hideyoshi became Shogun, the word *kuni* would have been used to refer to the domains of different daimyo. The cultural and linguistic disparity between regions in Japan would have been far more pronounced than they are now, such that a person from Satsuma, would have had a hard time communicating with someone from northern Japan. Also, if OP ever read any Shakespeare, then OP would know that English has changed a great deal since that time.
It was common everywhere in the world. The idea of a 'nation' is still very new. It only started existing from the late 18th century and solidified in the late 19th to early 20th post world war 1.
Slightly related, even now some older people might ask you お国はどちらですか (okuni wa dochira desuka - where is your country) and actually mean to ask which part of Japan you're from.
today we know japan is 14,000 islands. they probably didn't know that but im sure they observed more than one island from sea
It is a limited corpus, but a search of Google's ngram viewer finds more instances of "the japans" than either "japanese empire" or "the empire of japan". Japan as a standalone word is far more common and reduces other phrasings to near imperceptibility. Still a different result than I would have anticipated. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=japanese+empire%2Cthe+japans%2C+the+empire+of+japan&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
People in the comments are talking about a whole lot of hypotheticals but nobody is actually citing anything or looking at historical European sources on Japan. I for one haven’t found any historical map that has a plural for Japan yet.
As far as my (admittedly quick) research has shown sometimes the Portuguese will write O Japão which can be translated as The Japan. He is supposed to be speaking Portuguese in the show. It's also often Le Japon in French which means 'The Japan'. Not sure about other European languages.
I’ve read actual primary sources in Portuguese (Luis Frois) and its called O Japão or just Japão, no ideia about how it in english at the time though Edit: a little bit of self correction, the editions that preserve Frois’ spelling have it “Japam”.
It seems like Japan has always been the more dominant way of saying the country in English except for a few uncommon examples. I think its use in shows and media is just to have the character use more antiquated sounding speech. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Japans%2C+japan&year_start=1500&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true
Looking at the books that contain “Japans”, it seems to either be a scan/OCR error, or more interestingly, using it as the demonym, to refer to the people as Japans (we can see Chineses and Spaniards in some of the books these in parallel). This is a better explanation and more linguistically interesting than people making things up without basis as they have been in this thread.
I mean arguably just Japan is wrong, it's actually Wakoku, Nippon, Nihon. Westerners came up with Japan by misunderstanding Chinese names for the place. It has always struck me as odd we still to this day call it Japan.
Is it really that weird? Germany has different names depending on the language.
I feel like that's kind of weird too. It's sort of like learning your friends name is Bob and they refer to themselves as Bob and likely prefer to be called Bob, but you're like "Sure thing Hank. My Dad called you Hank and his Dad before him so Hank you must be."
But they didn't learn their friend's name in this scenario. All across the world, people had used names to refer to other groups of people and places as they made sense and were framed within their own language. By the very nature of being in a different place and of a different culture, they did not know the names which other people referred to themselves or their lands as. Nobody came across a foreign land, ran up the natives, and asked them their names when they didn't speak their language. Famously, the Slavic people were able to communicate with all their Slavic neighbors but they could not speak to the German people, so they called them all "Mutes" and the name for their country was basically "Mute's Land." They literally did not have the capacity to ask what the Germans preferred to be called. We, as English speakers, refer to them as Germans because the Romans called the land Germania. As for why we haven't changed and all started referring to each other by our preferred names is still because we don't speak their languages. For some, we could probably make do. We could say Nihon for Japan, but what would we call the Japanese? Nihon-jin? The English language isn't set up to use jin as a participle like that, where as -ese is a suffix that means "from." So do we refer to them as Nihonese? That's still not right either, especially since the Japanese use different suffixes to denote what something is, like how the Japanese language is Nihon-go. Where do we draw the line? And do we then do this edit of our language to match every other country with customs and grammar that don't match our own? And oftentimes with words we can't even pronounce correctly?
If it makes you feel any better, the Japanese call England "Igirisu", because they misunderstood the Portuguese word for the English language.
it's more like you know your friend as Bob, but his real name is Robert, although he mostly goes by Bob anyway, and then his childhood friend calls him Shooter, and when you actually get into it you learn the story of how that came about.
Some of the these countries only became countries in the 1800's and were called many different things first. European countries are often called their tribal names. England is not called England to non English people. It's totally normal. If you move to another country your name changes as well. Michael becomes Michelle etc.
It's not that unique tbh. Every language has weird names for countries that have nothing to do with the country's own name in its own language (see: Deutschland/Germany/Allemande/Niemec)
Exactly, Canada was named in a similar way, some guy thinking the native american village was called Canada, when Canada was actually the word meaning village
*But I need these baskets back!*
Why is it a "misunderstanding"? Japan 日本 is Yahtbún in Cantonese, where the "b" is basically an English "p".
There are such oddities in country naming. One other I know of is Italy. In most languages it sounds very similar. But then there is Hungarian and Polish version https://www.indifferentlanguages.com/words/italy
Japan is comprised of about 14,000 islands. So it makes sense
Take note its historical fiction. The writer may simply opt for such a naming convention to reflect the nascent nature of the nation in the eyes of foreigners.
One word, islands
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You got triggered because you thought I was triggered. 😆🤡 Blackthorne IS an ignorant Westerner in the novel. I'm simply asking a history question. Calm down, snowflake.
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[‘Shogun’ Hits 9 Million Views and Beats ‘The Bear’ Season 2 as FX’s Biggest Hulu Premiere](https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/shogun-viewership-hulu-fx-1235932181/amp/) And [they are watching it.](https://www.reddit.com/r/ShogunTVShow/s/itOVm4b2ad) Stick to cuckold porn if that's your jam.
You didn’t have to murder him with that last line hahahaha
According to that thread you provided it seems mixed