What Do You Call Someone From Japan? (Helpful Content!)

Someone from Japan is called Japanese. The country is largely an ethnic monolith, though there are of course considerable other ethnic groups living in Japan today, as well as a broad Japanese diaspora spread across the world. Japanese is both a nationality and an ethnicity, depending on how you look at it.

It’s always important to remember when asking a question like this, the distinction between someone’s national identity and their ethnic identity.

Most Japanese people today are Japanese in both the ethnic and national sense, but it’s also very important to remember the parts of the population that may not fit this description, but are still Japanese citizens.

Let’s find out more.

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What is someone from Japan called?

Someone from Japan is called Japanese.

This is the simple, short, quick way of explaining it. If someone is a citizen of the country of Japan, or if they are descended from Japanese people, then they themselves are Japanese.

This is in the sense of our modern idea of the nation-state, though, and while Japan has existed as a recognized place for millennia, our modern conception of it is much different in many ways from historical conceptions.

Today, though, if your nationality, legally speaking, derives from Japan, then you are Japanese.

Indeed, while many countries are hugely ethnically diverse, Japan is much more ethnically unified.

Around 98% of the population of Japan are what we would call Yamato people, an ethnic group that covers virtually the entire country and descend from an admixture of Kofun and Yayoi people.

So, for the vast majority of the Japanese population, Japanese describes both their nationality and their ethnicity.

Of course, though, there are large populations of people living in Japan who are not ethnically Japanese, but are Japanese citizens.

Other native ethnic groups include the Ainu people, who make up a group of around 16,000 people living in the lands around the Sea of Okhotsk, including islands like Hokkaido, Northeast Honshu, and Sakhalin.

They are an indigenous group, ethnically distinct and speaking a different language.

The Ryukyuan people are the larger minority ethnic group in Japan, representing around 300,000 people in the population.

They are an East Asian ethnic group native to the Ryukyu Islands.

You also have the Emishi people of Honshu, and the historical Hayato group.

Clearly, then, Japan is ethnically diverse, and there are many people who are of Japanese citizenship who may feel themselves to be something other than simply Japanese.

Where, then, does the name Japan come from in the first place?

Where does the name “Japan” come from?

It’s important to note that Japan is not generally what people living in the country call it; usually it is called “Nippon” or “Nihon” in Japanese.

Before that, it was known in China as Wa.

The term “Japan” is instead based on the Chinese pronunciations of the Kanji used by the Japanese, and this name was introduced to the European world by Chinese traders.

Marco Polo recorded the pronunciation of the Chinese name of the land as Cipangu in the 13^th Century, and Portuguese traders in Southeast Asia also encountered the name Japang or Japun, the Malay name for the country.

This word was then brought to Europe in the 16^th Century.

It was first spelled in English as Giapan.

The word literally means “sunrise”, and Japan has historically been associated with the image of the rising sun.

Jih meaning “sun” and pun meaning origin, the country is literally just called the sun’s origin or the sunrise country.

Is Japanese an ethnicity or nationality?

This is an important question to keep in mind and one that is worth stressing. Broadly speaking, it can unhelpfully be defined in both ways.

Being a citizen of Japan is likely a simpler way of looking at it; this makes you Japanese.

Also, though, Japanese specifically describes the ethnicity of around 98% of Japan’s population.

To most of the non-Japanese indigenous people living in Japan and surrounding islands, being Japanese may not mean much to them.

Their cultural and ethnic identity is far more important, and they are only Japanese in the sense of the recent invention of the nation state.

Citizenship and ethnicity are very different things, though we may use the same words to describe them.

Where do Japanese people live?

One other important point to be aware of is the widespread Japanese diaspora.

There are an estimated 122 million Japanese people living in Japan, and there are significant diasporas elsewhere in the world.

Brazil is the largest, with an enormous population of around 2 million Japanese people.

A further 1.5 million Japanese people live in the United States, and there are then smaller populations around 100-150,000 in Canada, the Philippines, Peru and China.

Any of these people may find any number of things to be true of their own ethnic and cultural identity; they may prefer to think of themselves as Japanese, or they may think of themselves more as assimilated with their new homes.

It’s never a simple question!

So, there’s a short answer and a long answer.

The short answer is that someone from Japan is called Japanese, regardless of any other details of their identity.

A citizen of Japan is Japanese. Of course, though, the reality is more complex, and the long answer is that Japanese is an ethnicity, and many people living with Japan’s jurisdiction may not consider themselves to be Japanese in the strictest sense.

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Founder - @PollyWebster

Polly Webster is the founder of Foreign Lingo and a seasoned traveler with a decade of exploration under her belt.

Over the past 10 years, she has journeyed to numerous countries around the globe, immersing herself in diverse cultures, traditions, and languages.

Drawing from her rich experiences, Polly now writes insightful articles about travel, languages, traditions, and cultures, sharing her unique perspectives and invaluable tips with her readers.

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