Japanese exonyms

Japanese exonyms are the names of places in the Japanese language that differ from the name given in the place's dominant language.

While Japanese names of places that are not derived from the Chinese language generally tend to represent the endonym or the English exonym as phonetically accurately as possible, the Japanese terms for some place names are obscured, either because the name was borrowed from another language or because of some other obscure etymology, such as referring to England (more specifically the United Kingdom) as イギリス (Igirisu), which is based on the Portuguese term for "English", Inglês. Exonyms for cities outside of the East Asian cultural sphere tend to be more phonetically accurate to their endonyms than the English exonyms if the endonym is significantly different from the English exonym.

The names for nations and cities that existed before major Japanese orthographic reforms in the Meiji era usually have ateji, or kanji characters used solely to represent pronunciation. However, the use of ateji today has become far less common, as katakana has largely taken over the role of phonetically representing words of non-Sino-Japanese origin. As significant differences exist between the pronunciations of the Chinese and Japanese languages, many of the ateji terms for the exonyms of foreign, non-Sinitic terms are unrecognizable in Chinese, and likewise, since some of the ateji terms derived from Chinese, the aforementioned terms do not match the Japanese on or kun readings for the pronunciation of the given kanji.

China
For place names derived from the Chinese language, Japanese typically uses the kanji equivalents of the Chinese characters that make up their respective endonyms, albeit with a Sino-Japanese pronunciation called on readings. Some place names, however, also have an approximate pronunciation (or transcription) of a historical English exonym if the area is internationally well-known, such as Beijing and Hong Kong, and such transcriptions tend to be more common than the on-yomi or the Mandarin transcriptions. Most place names derived from Mandarin also have a Japanese transcription of the Mandarin pronunciation.

One detail to be noted, however, is that for the names of certain districts or areas in Hong Kong and Macau, the pronunciations of the Japanese transcriptions typically try to imitate the Cantonese pronunciation instead of the Mandarin pronunciation.

The Chinese characters for the endonyms above are simplified Chinese characters and will only appear in the table above if they differ from the kanji shinjitai (the current set of Japanese kanji). Most transcriptions above can be written either in kanji or katakana.

India
Since India is home to many different languages and English is an official language in the country, Japanese exonyms are largely based on the English exonyms. The English exonyms are also familiar to many Indians.

Italy
Japanese exonyms for Italian place names are generally based on the Italian pronunciation rather than English exonyms.

South Korea
While most South Korean place names are derived from words in the Chinese language, Japanese can refer to a Korean place name using Japanese on-yomi (Jeju (濟州) is Saishū (さいしゅう) in Japanese) or a pronunciation that imitates the Korean endonym name as closely as possible (Itaewon (梨泰院) is Itewon (イテウォン) or Ritai'in (りたいいん) in Japanese). Many place names in Korea have at least two of the pronunciations, the first being based on the Japanese on-yomi or kun-yomi and the second being based on the Korean endonym, with the latter being made so that the Japanese could navigate and ask for directions more clearly to native Koreans. Korean-based pronunciations are usually written in katakana.

Taiwan
Similar to Chinese exonyms, Japanese can either use a transcription based on Mandarin or the Japanese on-yomi of the endonym. However, there are some Japanese place names that are unrelated to the Chinese name of the place, but are actually based on the Taiwanese aboriginal languages.