ABSTRACT
A SANE man may twiddle a coat-button, but an expert alienist has sometimes detected dementia through this act. People therefore wondered how serious was the symptom when the Foreign Office in Tokyo let it be known in 1935, to all who were interested, that henceforth the name Nippon would be preferred, and that the official practice in future would be to speak of the region hitherto known as the Far East by the name Eastern Asia. It appeared at first as though the question of Nippon was merely the settlement of a fine point in philology. Though the fame of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha was worldwide, the foreigner in Japan was generally informed that Nihon was considered more elegant, and in the notification regarding the use of Nippon, it was expressly stated that in names where Nihon was sanctioned by long usage, it would remain, as in Nihonbashi. But presently Nippon began to appear on postmarks and other places where it had been customary to use “Japan.” As regards Eastern Asia, there was a certain amount of reason for the change. East and west are purely relative terms, and Americans had customarily taken trips to “the Orient,” since the United States is so big that “the East” and “the West” are in common speech both comprised in its own boundaries. But there was also the suggestion of a feeling of annoyance that the position of Japan on the mundane sphere should be merely relative to that of England, with her Near East, East, and Far East. This, indeed, was the reason for the change; but throughout many years of military aggression Japan got so thoroughly into the habit of “keeping the peace of the Far East,”—and proclaimed it so often as her sacred mission-that nothing was heard of Nippon keeping the peace of Eastern Asia, She was too busy absorbing it.
